The Real Nightmare Begins When You Wake Up

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You don’t wake up from a nightmare; you wake into one. This is one of the first things we learn from reading Franz Kafka’s works.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up from a nightmare to find himself in one far worse than the one he was dreaming: he discovers that he has metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. In The Trial, Joseph K. wakes up to find himself arrested without committing a crime or doing anything wrong. In The Castle, K. is woken by a young man who, out of nowhere, tells him that he needs permission from the Castle to sleep where he is already sleeping because everything, including the inn, belongs to the Castle.

When you scratch the surface of (the experienced) reality, the Kafkaesque is what you’ll get. The Kafkaesque is this ridiculously complex and illogical universe that the simulation (i.e., world) we’re in is based on. Everything in the simulation is logical and can be explained to a five-year-old until you look at the code.

The simulation we’re in is the experienced reality but not reality itself, (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer simulation). As Kant would put it, it is the phenomenon but not the noumenon. The simulation hides the nightmarish qualities of the Kafkaesque, which lies beneath the surface of the experienced reality and is where what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again.

In the world of our experienced reality, we live as if everything makes sense, but we’re just not thinking about it at the moment, when, in reality, experienced reality will collapse as soon as we start thinking about it. That’s how you scratch its surface, by THINKING. “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. When we start to think (to doubt), we will find ourselves standing next to Descartes, losing our minds (actually, losing everything but our minds) in a world created by some evil genius. “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this evil genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity,” writes Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy.

When what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again, that’s when we know we’re on our way to (re)discover the [what?].

Between experienced reality and reality itself, there is the Kafkaesque. All those who “exit” the simulation find themselves in it. Waking up in the Kafkaesque, however, does not mean you’re fully awake. The first time you wake up, you enter the nightmare. But the journey doesn’t end there. Beyond the nightmare, another world awaits…

Unfortunately, like Kafka’s protagonists, we eventually always choose to continue living as usual even in the nightmare, as if the status quo was never disturbed, as if everything unquestionably makes sense, as if “it’s just the way the world works”, as if “this is life”, as if there are no other ways to live than default living. That’s what makes the Kafkaesque truly Kafkaesque, living ordinarily even when we find ourselves in the extraordinary.

And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber…

— Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 25, 2026.

The Landfill of Knowledge: How Prompting LLMs Turned Thinking into Scavenging

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If anything, we’ve become dumpster divers, rummaging through the garbage produced by LLMs.

Does this not tastefully describe how we’ve been generating content lately, ladies and gentlemen?

What’s a prompt? It’s a fishing net we throw into the sea of processed human knowledge.

And after the prompt comes the statistically assembled answer, which is the fishing net pulled out of the water, filled with … what? Synthesized trash (perceived as treasure by some) and mutated sea creatures.

An LLM’s answer, is it anything more than a heap of fragments probabilistically woven together to resemble an intelligible reply? No. It is just that.

Every prompt tears open a trash bag in the landfill of knowledge and spills its contents. We are scavengers, and we pick what we like and make it ours. We eat what’s edible, i.e., whatever isn’t rotten, spoiled, wilted, rancid… We’ve been “already eating from the trashcan all the time.” Of course, it may no longer be the (force-fed) ideology that we’re used to. But it’s a statistical remix of existing ideological material, compressed, processed, customized, regenerated. It tastes familiar, however, so… whatever.

Much of what we consume online today is, in fact, the work of ragpickers of ideas. They gather fragments from everywhere (most of which come from LLMs these days) and nail them together into something that resembles a thought. Every post is a shanty built from intellectual debris.

(In a world where content is produced endlessly by machines, the thinker is no longer the architect of ideas but a scavenger of fragments. Perhaps the ragpicker is the thinker of an age drowning in excess.)

Our homeless minds have embraced sloth, the most addictive drug of all (the one that is often confused with satisfaction), and now live comfortably on the spare change dropped into their paper cups. Why think?

The machines replaced us, we accepted it, we’re still pretending it hasn’t happened.

And those of you who haven’t been replaced by machines should think twice before you laugh at us. Ask yourselves why. It’s because you work for the machine.

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 4, 2026.

The Good Man

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“I’m a good man,” he said. “You can measure my goodness by counting the number of people who believe that they have deceived me or have taken advantage of me. The reality, however, is the contrary. I am the one who has deceived them and taken advantage of them by being a good man.”

“I’m a good man,” he continued. “But that doesn’t mean I’m a weak or cowardly man. My kindness is often perceived as naivety, I know. When people ask for my help, I help them. When people charge more for their services, I pay them. When people want to use me as a scapegoat, I let them. And I know what it looks like to you. It looks like I’m helping the lazy do what he ought to be doing, paying the thief extra for ripping me off, and sacrificing myself for people who do not care about me. To you, it looks like they are taking advantage of me in broad daylight. But the reality is not how you see it.”

“I’m a good man,” he continued. “Yet, although it was never my true intention, I have punished the lazy man by doing his job, punished the thief by handing him the money he asked for, and punished the coward by sacrificing myself to save him. And if you do not see how I have punished them, then you have not yet had the opportunity to see true good and true evil.”

“I’m a good man,” he repeated. “And whether I’m dealing with good men or evil men, I always do the good thing. Whenever I can do good, I’ll do good. But I can see it in your eyes now, yes, I can see that you can no longer understand what good is and what evil is, can you? You live in a world beyond true good and evil. You live in a world of economic good and evil. We live in different dimensions. It’s only a coincidence that we drink in the same pub.”

This piece was first published on my Substack on September 12, 2025.