Yesterday, I promised to look into Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)
He was a Prague-born Jewish writer who wrote in German because of the historical and social reality of Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his feeling of being between worlds became central to his literature.
Here goes:
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis tells the story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect-like creature. Unable to work or communicate, he becomes increasingly isolated as his family, initially shocked, gradually distances themselves from him and takes on work to survive financially. Over time, Gregor deteriorates physically and emotionally, while his sister Grete, once caring, ultimately decides he must be gotten rid of. After being completely rejected by his family, Gregor dies alone, and the family quickly shifts their focus to a hopeful new beginning without him.
I'm one to look for a lesson, and maybe it is how tightly identity can become tied to performance. Gregor is valued almost exclusively as a worker and financial provider. Once that function collapses, his place in the family collapses too. In modern terms, that resonates with how easily self-worth can become entangled with job performance, productivity, or the ability to keep up with constant demands. When that breaks, through illness, burnout, unemployment, or caregiving responsibilities, people often discover that their “role-based value” was doing more work than they realized.
Another uncomfortable insight is how quickly empathy can shrink under pressure. Gregor’s family doesn’t start out cruel. They become overwhelmed, financially stressed, and gradually desensitized. That gradual erosion is very recognizable today: in workplaces with constant performance pressure, in healthcare systems under strain, or even in families stretched thin. It’s rarely a sudden moral failure; it’s a slow narrowing of what people can emotionally afford.
There’s also something about visibility. Gregor becomes physically impossible to integrate into normal life, and so he is literally pushed out of shared space. Today, people who are struggling with mental health issues, chronic fatigue, or long-term stress often become “less visible” in a similar way, not because they’ve changed form, but because they withdraw or are excluded from rhythms that assume full functioning.
In today's world, are we any better at valuing people beyond their productivity than Gregor's family was?
I do think that, in today’s society, we very much value what someone does over who they are as a person. It's a good reminder to value people for far more than their productivity, especially during the times where their situation makes it difficult for them to keep up.
ReplyDelete