Random Relationships, Day 1/30: What Kafka can teach us about techno-optimism. 🤔

You won't hear Kafka's name and the word "optimism" together often, for good reason... Kafka never met his father's expectations and wrote to deal with his unrelenting anxiety, guilt, and self-hatred.

He lived in a constant state of misery, dying at 41 without publishing the vast majority of his works. In fact, he asked his only good friend to BURN his works to the ground. He didn't believe any of it was worthy of praise.

Posthumously, Kafka's works were acknowledged as generation-defining, a masterful collection of dark, surreal writing that earned him mountains of praise and even a writing style named after him! But what can he teach us about Techno-Optimism?

Techno Optimism is "the stance that holds that technology plays a key role in ensuring that the good prevails over the bad." In Kafka's eyes, "the bad" referred to the infinite complexities of bureaucratic systems that place individuals in absurd, senseless situations.

One school of thought is that Kafka found the struggle to find solace and understanding both inescapable and impossible. But another is that he was calling upon us, his readers, to do what he couldn't and FIGHT. If you buy into the latter, then this is your call to action.

Kafka's work is a cue to any techno-optimist that our role is to fight complexity, confront absurdity, and solve real "people problems." Perhaps we can progress by directly confronting SOME of the issues leading to so much senseless pain.

After all, "Kafka’s work sought not to alleviate the soul through remedies of false hope or delusion, but rather, through the direct confrontation with the darker aspects of life." So let's honour that legacy, shall we?

Today's inspiration (and quotes) are from the randomly selected chapter on Kafka from "The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence" by Robert Pantano. Along with the topic of techno-optimism, which I think about often. I still define myself as a techno-optimist. Do you?

Please share your thoughts below! See you tomorrow... 🙏