Franz #kafka, by all accounts, led a thoroughly unimpressive life. He was an insurance clerk. An argument can be made that it is the sort of job you take when you’ve already given up on having a calling, and he spent his evenings writing things he was pretty sure no one wanted to read. He was chronically ill, socially detached, and riddled with self-doubt. The man basically specialized in existential dread and tuberculosis.

In his lifetime, he published a handful of short stories. Nothing major and certainly nothing that would make you think, “Ah yes, here is a literary titan in the making.” His novels, The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, were left incomplete, which feels appropriate given how much he doubted they were worth finishing. He died in 1924, telling his friend Max Brod to burn the lot. Straight to the flames, please and thank you.

Max, being either wildly disobedient or secretly clairvoyant, did the exact opposite. He published it. All of it, that is, the unfinished drafts, the notes, the existential ramblings. And somehow, people read it. Then scholars read it. Then critics called it genius. Today, Kafka is a literary monolith. He has an adjective #Kafkaesque, all to himself, which is more than most popes can claim.

The dude died thinking he was irrelevant. He died knowing he was a failed writer whose best legacy might be a properly filed insurance claim. Meanwhile, after he kicked it, the world decided he was a prophet of modern alienation. He never knew. Never got to bask in the praise, nor sign an autograph. Never saw the lectures not the fanfare.

Imagine that, spending your whole life convinced you were shouting into the void, only to never find out, that the void was listening.