The Metamorphosis of the Employee
Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, and here’s the detail everyone gets wrong. His first thought is not what happened to me. His first thought is the train. He’s worried he’ll be late for work. The man has turned into a monstrous bug overnight and his immediate panic is the 5am connection and what the chief clerk will say.
Kafka isn’t being absurd here. He’s being precise. He’s showing you a man so absorbed by his function that he experiences losing his humanity as, mostly, a scheduling problem.
That’s the whole horror, and it’s not a horror about insects. It’s about what happens to a person who built his entire identity around being useful to an institution. Gregor was the provider, the reliable one, the salesman who never missed. And the moment he can’t perform the function, he finds out there was nothing underneath it the world had any use for. The family he supported recoils. The firm he served sends someone to check why he’s late. His value was the function, and when the function broke, the value evaporated, and eventually so does he.
I think about Gregor every time I notice myself becoming the thing I do at work. When backend engineer stops being something I’m doing and starts being something I am. Because the day you fully become your function is the day you become replaceable by anything that performs it better. And right now a great deal of capital is betting something will.
This is the real shape of the AI anxiety under all the noise. It isn’t that the machine is smart. It’s that so many of us already did to ourselves what Gregor did. Narrowed down to a function, a role we execute, a ticket we close. And a function is exactly the thing a machine can assume. We turned ourselves into the kind of worker that’s swappable in principle. The metamorphosis didn’t start when AI arrived. It started when we agreed to be defined by our output.
There’s an exit Gregor never found, though. He couldn’t picture himself as anything but the provider, so when the role cracked he had nothing to become. The person who is more than his function survives the function going obsolete. The one who’s been building a self that exceeds the job, opinions, taste, a way of seeing, things made for their own sake, can lose the function and still be someone. Credentials don’t give me value, my thoughts do. The function can be automated. The thoughts are the part the firm never owned and the machine can’t inherit.
So the practical lesson from a story about a man turning into a bug is almost mundane. Don’t let your usefulness become your identity. Be more than the role even while you’re excellent at it. Keep a self that survives the morning you wake up and the function is gone, because for a lot of people this decade, that morning is coming, and the only ones walking through it are the ones who were never only the thing they did.
Gregor died because he had nothing left when the work stopped. Have something left. Ideally something with a spine.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.