By Ting Lian
Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to measure intrinsic self-worth through external utility. From an early age, we are taught to construct our identity around what we perform, what we earn, and the burdens we carry for the people around us. We convince ourselves that as long as we remain essential, reliable, and productive, we are safe. But beneath this quiet arrangement lies a haunting, unspoken question that sits at the very heart of human existence: if you stripped away everything you provide for others, would you still be loved—or were you only ever useful?
In 1915, the Prague writer Franz Kafka published his most well-known novella, The Metamorphosis. It begins with one of the most celebrated and unsettling opening lines in literature: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug”. At first glance, Kafka’s narrative reads like a bizarre modernist fable: a young travelling salesman wakes up to discover that his body has been turned into a giant, repulsive insect. But the true psychological horror of The Metamorphosis does not reside in the physical monstrosity of Gregor’s transformation. Rather, it lies in what that transformation instantly reveals about human behavior, transactional relationships, and the fragile nature of conditional love. Kafka’s story thus forces readers to look into a mirror that most spends their entire lives avoiding.
Before his sudden transformation, Gregor Samsa was the model of self-sacrifice and personal responsibility. He spends his days travelling endlessly across train routes, enduring humiliating working conditions, exhausting schedules, and an arrogant employer. He does not do this out of passion or personal ambition; he does it to pay off his parents’ overwhelming debts and to financially support his household. Kafka makes this explicit: “If I didn’t hold back for my parents’ sake, I would’ve quit ages ago”. Within his family, Gregor is essential. He is needed, relied upon. And because he is relied upon, he assumes he is loved.
Yet beneath this domestic harmony lies a sinister transactional dynamic. Gregor identity is completely swallowed by this function, he is not valued as an individual with internal desires, artistic inclinations, or private grief. He is valued as a provider—a commercial asset whose worth is directly tethered to his output. In modern life, transactional relationships play out across workplaces, families, and romantic partnerships. Society encourages one to tie their identity to their productivity, income, social titles, and their capacity to act as an unshakable support system for those around us. We convince ourselves that being useful is the same thing as being cherished. But utility is not affection. It is a contract that is only valid for as long as the terms can be fulfilled.
The moment Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed, the transactional contract is irrevocably broken. He can no longer get out of bed, catch the early morning train, and bring home his salary. His body simply refuses to participate in the machinery of his job. It is here that Kafka exposes a dark layer of human pathology; the most disturbing aspect of The Metamorphosis is not Gregor Samsa’s grotesque transformation, but how rapidly the perception of his loved ones shift once his utility vanishes. The family that once relied on him as a protector instantly views him as a repulsive, inconvenient burden, whispering behind closed doors and eventually they begin to openly wish for his disappearance. However, Gregor’s inner self has not changed. His thoughts, his memory, and his affection for his family remain entirely intact. What changed was simply his ability to produce. Kafka illustrates how quickly human relationships alter when circumstances shift. When a person is no longer able to perform their habitual role—whether due to illness, burnout, financial failure, or personal change—the illusion of unconditional connection shatters. Are they invested in one’s soul, or merely utilizing one’s function?
Born in Prague in 1833, Kafka lived a suffocating dual life. By day, he worked as a meticulous clerk at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Office. By night, he poured his nocturnal anxieties into his writing. Kafka was haunted by deep personal isolation, severe insomnia, and a profound sense of inadequacy. In a revealing line from his personal writings, he confessed, “There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.” At the core of Kafka’s psychological torment was his relationship with his father, Hermann Kafka—a merchant who never understood his son’s sensitive nature. In a 45-page letter for his father that was never sent, he writes ”All my writing was about you. I only lamented there the things I couldn’t lament on your breast.” Kafka sought literature as sanctuary, an attempt to escape his father’s suffocating judgement and the painful realities of his daily life. Yet as literary scholar Ritchie Robertson famously noted, “the flight from life into literature must fail because literature has to be about life” (Robertson 2005).
Through Gregor Samsa, Kafka confronts his own greatest fear: the terror of being valued only as a tool, and the crushing loneliness of realizing that even among kin, one can be fundamentally alone. French philosopher Simone Weil argues that the foundation of moral life is attention—the discipline of truly seeing another person in their reality, independent of one’s own needs. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she wrote (Weil 1970). For Weil, the failure to attend is not just a lapse in kindness, it is a form of violence. In her essay on “The Illiad”, she defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subject to it into a thing” (Weil, The Iliad 1940). The Samsa family’s crime is that they converted Gregor from an insect to inconvenience. Once they stop attending to him as a person, they can plan his disappearance without guilt.
Kafka’s critique extends far beyond individual family dynamics to diagnose the structural condition of modern civilization. In works like The Trial and The Castle, Kafka explored how human beings construct complex systems—corporations, institutions, bureaucracies, and social expectations—and surrender agency to them. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that in Kafka’s universe, modern bureaucratic machinery operates with a senseless automatism. The terrifying element of Kafkaesque systems is that they are not controlled by evil masterminds; instead, human beings build structures and treat artificial values and rules as unchangeable divine laws, endlessly repeating protocol until the individual is crushed beneath the weight of the machine. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly prevalent in modern digital and corporate life: performance metrics, algorithms, and productivity standards, we spend our whole lives anxiously trying to survive the very systems we built, allowing our value to be dictated by spreadsheets, output, and external validation. We convince ourselves that if we just work harder and remain endlessly useful, the system will eventually grant us dignity. But as Kafka demonstrates in The Castle, the system never validates you, the castle gates remain forever closed, and the individual dies of exhaustion waiting for an approval that was never meant to arrive.
Kafka did not write to offer comfortable solutions or self-help solutions. He offers radical clarity that forces readers to recognize that modern systems and transactional relationships are inherently absurd and indifferent. In doing so, the individual gains a resilient internal freedom, however quiet. When worth is no longer measured by conditional approval, the system loses its ultimate power over the self. Strip away the job titles, incomes, and roles performed to keep everyone else comfortable; and beneath all of it, there is a being who exists prior to any function. Kafka’s work is ultimately an invitation to reclaim life from the trap of pure utility, that existence need not be justified through endless production. One is not an insect in a machine. One is a being, and intrinsic value was never meant to be transactional.