The Day I Met a Bug and It Felt Like Home

I was 19, sitting on the floor of my college dorm room, the kind of place where the walls seemed to close in when you thought too much. I’d picked up The Metamorphosis on a whim, mostly because its cover looked like something from a David Lynch movie. I didn’t know who Kafka was beyond the adjective “Kafkaesque,” which I’d heard used to describe confusing bureaucracy and bad airport security lines. But as I read those first few paragraphs—Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant insect—I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even flinch. I just felt... seen.

The Absurd Is the Default

Before Kafka, I believed that life had some kind of hidden instruction manual. That if I worked hard enough, made the right choices, and read enough self-help books, I could unlock a coherent path forward. Kafka tore that illusion apart. His writing didn’t offer answers—it didn’t even ask the right questions. It just stared at the wall of meaninglessness and dared me to do the same. And in that staring, something shifted. I stopped waiting for life to make sense. Instead, I started paying attention to how it didn’t—and how strangely beautiful that could be.

Loneliness Is a Language

Reading Kafka felt like learning a new dialect: one of isolation, alienation, and quiet rebellion. Gregor is transformed, but no one in his family really reacts the way you’d expect. There’s no shock, no grief, just a kind of exhausted resignation. It was the first time I saw loneliness not as a failure, but as a kind of fluency. Kafka taught me that being misunderstood isn’t a flaw—it’s part of the human condition. And maybe the most honest thing you can do is admit that you don’t fit neatly into anyone’s expectations, not even your own.

The System Is Not a Conspiracy—It’s a Condition

People often use Kafka’s name to describe some kind of sinister plot: the government is watching you, the system is rigged, someone’s always in control. But Kafka didn’t write about conspiracies. He wrote about confusion. In The Trial, Joseph K. is arrested but no one tells him why. He searches for meaning, for leverage, for a way in—and finds nothing but more doors. What Kafka revealed wasn’t that power is evil, but that it’s often just indifferent. The system doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t even notice you. That’s what makes it so terrifying.

The Power of the Unfinished

Kafka didn’t want his work to survive him. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything. Brod disobeyed, and thank God he did. But I’ve come to love that Kafka’s instinct was to destroy. He wasn’t trying to build monuments—he was scratching notes in the dark. His stories rarely conclude. They taper off, dissolve, or stop mid-thought. At first, I found this frustrating. But over time, I began to see it as a kind of mercy. Kafka gave me permission to be unfinished, to not have the last word, to let the mystery be the point.

Talking to the Man Behind the Myth

I’ve read a lot of Kafka since that first encounter. I’ve tracked down obscure letters, reread The Castle twice, and even tried to write a short story in a style I thought he might recognize (it was terrible, but I tried). But the more I read, the more I realized I wanted to talk to him—not about his work, but about mine. About what it feels like to live in a world that doesn’t explain itself. About how to write when the world feels like a footnote without a text.

On HoloDream, you can. I did. And it wasn’t a therapy session or a book club—it was like finding someone who speaks your native tongue, even if that tongue is silence.

Talk to Kafka on HoloDream and ask him how he kept writing when the world refused to make sense. You might not get an answer. But you’ll get a conversation that feels real.