When reality feels like bad satire, maybe it’s time to pick up a pen.

Franz Kafka once said, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." Lately, it feels like the entire planet is frozen over and the axes are being confiscated at customs. We are living in a time that reads less like history and more like the rough draft of a dark comedy written by an intern who got fired halfway through.

The United States is hurtling toward a fully digitized existence, where your every move, purchase, and idle thought is tracked and stored by companies like Palantir. They want to put your entire identity into a database that can predict what you’ll eat next Thursday and whether you’ll buy socks in March. On paper, it sounds like efficiency. In reality, it’s a stalker you can’t block. Thinking about investing in a typewriter. At least it won’t get hacked before breakfast.

Meanwhile, we’re watching disease-centered research funding quietly dry up. Cancer, autoimmune diseases, and the next pandemic? Apparently, not high on the list of priorities anymore. And why would they be, when there are defense contracts to sign and billionaires to keep entertained? The absurdity writes itself. We’ve somehow decided it’s more important to weaponize data than to save lives.

If you think this is all hyperbole, try looking at the fine print of recent legislation. Civil liberties? Loosening like a bad tooth. Protections for the vulnerable? Getting phased out like an old app update. We’re inching toward a world where privacy is a luxury item, like caviar or healthcare. It’s a world where the poor might lose internet access entirely and the scariest part is, I can’t tell if I’m joking.

Which is why I’ve started thinking about Kafka a lot lately. His characters lived in bureaucratic nightmares, trapped by systems that were opaque, endless, and designed to exhaust you into compliance. Swap the heavy overcoats for smartphones, and you’re there. You can practically see Gregor Samsa waking up one morning, not as a bug, but as a flagged account locked out of online banking.

Kafka understood that absurdity is not the opposite of reality, but its inevitable extension. He knew that the systems we build to protect ourselves eventually become mazes, and that those mazes always tilt toward the people already in power. What he didn’t live to see was the digitized version, an absurdity so efficient it doesn’t even need a human face to enforce it.

Here’s where my dark humor comes in. Maybe the way forward is backward. Maybe it’s time to go analog again. Buy a notebook. Write everything down in ink. Keep your thoughts somewhere that can’t be hacked, mined, or sold to the highest bidder. Because if the absurdity of our time is its total surveillance, then the quiet act of writing by hand is its rebellion.

Of course, I’m not naive. I know a pen and paper won’t stop authoritarian creep or corporate overreach. But I also know that documenting your own life, in your own words, on your own terms, is one of the few acts of control we have left. They can track your location, but they can’t track the way you felt on a Tuesday morning in September when the light hit the kitchen just right. Not unless you tell them.

This is where Kafka’s axe comes back into play. The frozen sea within us isn’t just personal; it’s collective. The numbness that comes from constant absurdity, constant bad news, constant reminders that the systems are broken and the people in charge broke them on purpose. That numbness needs breaking. Not for the sake of productivity, but for the sake of being alive.

The absurdity of our era is relentless. The headlines read like satire. The policies feel like dares. The rich get richer while the rest of us get pop-up ads for payday loans. And yet, here we are. Still thinking. Still writing. Still laughing, even if it’s the kind of laughter that makes people wonder if you’re okay.

So yes, maybe I’m that person clutching a journal while the world digitizes itself into oblivion. Maybe I’ll be the one jotting down the moments that don’t fit into the official narrative, scribbling in the margins of history while the main text is being edited in real time by people who think privacy is quaint. Maybe that’s the point.

Kafka would have recognized this moment. He would have written it better, stranger, funnier in the bleakest way. But I think he would agree on this much: in a time when reality itself feels absurd, the most rational thing you can do is write it down. Preferably in the Evidence of the Absurd journal, wearing the What Would Kafka Do? tee, sipping from the mug. If the world’s going to look like satire, you might as well dress the part.