What if the real horror isn’t waking as a beetle, but as a man?

In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant beetle—a cockroach, a vermin, an intrusion of the inhuman into the domestic. The horror is obvious: loss of agency, social death, the grotesque made literal. It’s the nightmare of devolution, of becoming something other, something filthy.

But perhaps we’ve misunderstood the true absurdity.

What if the real nightmare is the opposite? Not a man waking as an insect, but an insect waking in a human body—forced to contend with taxes, performance reviews, dinner parties, and the crushing weight of being legible to others. Imagine a beetle, content in its instinctual certainty, finding itself hurled into the howling contradiction of human subjectivity.

Suddenly, it must interpret signs, participate in rituals, conform to decorum, all while performing a pantomime of “meaning.” It’s not the exoskeleton that’s horrifying – it’s the endless internal monologue. The soul-searching. The unbearable tension of being expected to have purpose.

We call Gregor’s fate tragic because he can no longer function in a world built for humans. But isn’t that the human condition already? An endless, futile negotiation between the raw fact of existence and the stories we invent to make it bearable.

Gregor becomes insect. We were never anything but.