On an otherwise uneventful day, a parcel bearing my name arrived. As expected, it contained a few books I had ordered on Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. Just as I was about to open them, a colleague appeared at my door, and with a tone of curiosity asked, “Sir, what is it about Kafka and Albert Camus that draws you to them so deeply?” Of course, he had often seen me lost in their pages whenever there was a gentler hour. I wanted to tell him in detail but ended up smiling and asking, “What could you possibly know of Kafka and Camus?” He chuckled and replied, “I think I have seen them,they show up on my social media feed sometimes, Instagram mostly with sad music and black-and-white hues.” He also quoted a Kafka quote “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” “But that is where his knowledge ended, I am afraid. Which book it was from, what he was going through when he wrote it, the story behind those words, it was all a mystery to him. His response captures something troubling about our digital age. We have turned literature’s most penetrating diagnosticians of alienation into aesthetic accessories for our curated melancholy.Scroll through social media and you will find Kafka, Dostoevsky, Pessoa and Camus everywhere, their quotes float likeorphaned thoughts.Their insights have been compressed into bitesized wisdom for our scrolling consumption. “The Absurd is the essential concept and the first truth,” Camus wrote; and it has become a caption for sunset selfies now. Kafka’s observation that “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” has become motivational content for productivity influencers. This digital packaging represents more than literary dumbing-down. It reflects our profound disconnection from the very experiences these writers sought to illuminate.Kafka didn’t write about bureaucratic nightmares to create quotable content about workplace stress.Kafka’s world is not governed by tyrants, but by procedures.
In The Trial, Josef K. wakes into accusation without crime, a man swallowed by procedures that neither accuse nor explain. In Kafka’s world, the system doesn’t kill you, it erodes your shape until you vanish beneath its paperweight logic. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect not metaphorically, but bodily and is swiftly discarded by the very family he once sustained. Kafka does not depict horror in its spectacular or violent form, but in its quieter, more insidious manifestation.His is the terror of becoming illegible, first to others, and then, more devastatingly, to oneself. In this digital era, we are all Josef K. now, under review, without trial. Kafka forces us to confront a truth we often evade, that absurdity is not out there, it is embedded in the structures we serve, the languages we inherit, and the identities we perform.
“Kafka, Camus, and Dostoevsky aren’t for mood boards. Their work is a difficult but essential guide to finding our humanity in a world that often feels inhuman. The real question isn’t about aesthetic filters; it’s whether we’re brave enough to let their ideas disturb us and, through that disturbance, find our way back to authentic living.”
Similarly, Camus didn’t explore absurdity to provide inspirational quotes about embracing meaninglessness. His philosophy emerged from witnessing World War II’s devastation and recognizing that traditional sources of meaning (religion, nationalism, progress) had failed catastrophically. Yet instead of despair, he advocated for what he called “lucid indifference”, continuing to act ethically despite life’s ultimate meaninglessness. Today’s burnout epidemic makes their insights more relevant than ever. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues we have shifted from external oppression to internal exhaustion. We are not crushed by tyrants but consumed by the endless pressure to optimize ourselves. We treat mental health like a performance metric and approach personal growth like a productivity hack.This is precisely the kind of systematic absurdity Kafka diagnosed and the existential trap Camus taught us to navigate. But engaging seriously with these thinkers requires sustained attention, something our digital culture actively discourages. Reading “The Stranger” “The fall” “The Castle” or “Metamorphosis” means sitting with discomfort, uncertainty, and questions that don’t resolve into neat takeaways. It means accepting that some insights cannot be captured in screenshots or summarized in threads.
The irony is that our hunger for these fragments reveals genuine need. Young people especially seem drawn to existentialist theme, perhaps because they intuitively recognize the hollowness of our optimization and obsessed culture. But Instagram quotes can’t provide what Kafka and Camus actually offer. They offer the tools for living consciously in an often-senseless world. Real engagement with these writers involves what Camus called “revolt”. It is not a violent rebellion, but the simple insistence that human dignity matters even when the universe seems indifferent. It means what Kafka modelled: looking unflinchingly at systems that dehumanize us, even when that vision offers no easy solutions. This kind of philosophical engagement can’t be commodified or gamified. It requires the radical act of stepping away from our feeds, sitting with difficult texts, and allowing ourselves to be changed by encounters with minds that refused comfortable illusions. In our age of infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds, perhaps the most rebellious act is what Camus called “lucid living”. Choosing deliberate engagement over passive consumption, depth over virality, and genuine questioning over borrowed wisdom. Kafka and Camus or Dostoevsky don’t belong on our mood boards. They belong in the difficult, essential work of figuring out how to be human in an increasingly inhuman world. The real question isn’t whether their quotes look good with that aesthetic filter. It is whether we are brave enough to let their ideas actually disturb usand, in that disturbance, find our way back to authentic living.
(The author a banker by profession is a freelancer. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
Jan Nisar Afzal
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