“Everyone's trying so, so hard. I think that’s what it is.”
A laminated message in Chinese, weighed down by stones at Kafka’s grave, written last December.
It was spring in Prague when I found it.
And it broke me.
It read:
“The modern world isn’t so bad. I want to say that.
However, however.
Everyone’s trying so, so hard. I think that’s what it is.”
I hadn’t expected to cry while reading Chinese.
But there I was—beneath a grey sky in the Prague suburbs,
staring at Kafka’s name,
and crying quietly.
Because the modern world is that bad.
The news feels like nausea.
Everything online feels like shouting.
Everything offline feels like dust.
We’re all pretending to know what we’re doing.
Pretending to want careers.
Pretending to enjoy social events.
We flap our
Kafka would understand.
I visited his tiny house on Golden Lane,
barely large enough for a human,
exactly right for an insect.
I listened to Cigarettes After Sex's K. as tourists swarmed Prague Castle nearby,
but I felt dizzy in the spring sunlight.
And I remembered this:
“To break this ice, it won’t be an axe. It must be spring.
I don’t have the power to be spring—
so let me at least be an axe.”
Let me be an axe.
Let me push the boulder like Sisyphus, again and again.
Because maybe it’s not the work that matters,
but the eagerness to try.
The belief that we can still shape our experience,
still refuse to live like the world told us to.
And in the end—
maybe the quietest, most human truth is this:
Everyone’s trying so, so hard.
And Kafka?
He saw us. All of us.
—
#Entertainment #Books #Kafka #LonelyWords #ModernLife #Existentialism
