Franz Kafka was a healthcare claims administrator and insurance underwriter

https://vienna.earth/plate/russell/kafka-insurance-career

by alakep • 3 years ago

75 64 3 years ago

jbarrow• 3 years ago

This explains a lot; I’ve been thinking for years (ever since being diagnosed with a chronic health condition) about writing an essay likening the American insurance system to Kafka’s _The Trial_. The bureaucracy is absolutely soul-crushing, and has left me in tears on multiple occasions. While nearly no individual person you deal with is at fault or malicious, the whole experience ends up being something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

rgrieselhuber• 3 years ago

The Metamorphosis always read (to me) as the dread felt by a society as it unwittingly becomes increasingly bureaucratic and atomized.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

Yeah, it is probably helpful to be aware, that quite often the person you are complaining to, knows the flaws of the system way better than you, but is equally powerless to change anything about it.

But sometimes they can do something that helps you, so it often helps to not treat them like they are personally responsible for everything, just because they work there.

version_five• 3 years ago

Yes, it's important to remember that Kafka didn't invent "Kafkaesque" - it's literally just an artistic description of bureaucracy. So when people talk about Kafkaesque interactions with government or large companies, that adjective is generally redundant.

tiahura3• 3 years ago

He was a work comp claim administrator - in the US, they are some of the worst people on the planet.

This was before doctors became incurably greedy - so a bit early for first party health insurance.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

He was a work comp claim administrator - in the US, they are some of the worst people on the planet.

Whoah now, don't talk about my dad like that! In all seriousness though, my dad said that all the places he worked at over the years generally accepted over 99% of the claims they received.

My dad did develop a visceral hatred for chiropractors over the course of his career though.

DennisP• 3 years ago

I have my suspicions but I'm still gonna ask the reason for the chiropractor hate.

barbariangrunge3• 3 years ago

Workman’s comp in Canada typically takes over seven years to process and never actually compensated you, it’s always a fraction of what you’d need to even make up for lost income

brigadier132• 3 years ago

This was before doctors became incurably greedy

Doctors are not the reason healthcare is expensive.

pstuart• 3 years ago

Well, the AMA does constrain the number of doctors in the US so that supply and demand part is on them.

tiahura3• 3 years ago

From the AMA:

https://www.ama-assn.org/sites/ama-assn.org/files/2023-03/20...

twoodfin2• 3 years ago

Any chance the US has of achieving the cost savings of other industrialized nations depends crucially on doctors making a lot less.

https://www.beckersasc.com/benchmarking/how-physician-pay-in...

creamynebula• 3 years ago

Rather than it being greediness by a class of individuals, in my view, it is that capitalism rewards greediness, and sometimes it obligates you to be greedy when you are just an employee or selling a service. People are inserted in a system composed by many layers that incentivize and obligate greediness.

biesnecker• 3 years ago

I was fully expecting this to be an article showing how Kafka-esque the American health insurance system is.

keiferski3• 3 years ago

I somewhat dislike the line of Kafka commentary that focuses on The Trial and The Castle and then associates their bureaucratic themes with his own life experience working various office jobs.

One, because his writing is about much more than this theme (in which kafkesque is too frequently confused/mixed with Orwellian) but more because it pushes away his short stories and aphorisms, which I think are much, much better than his longer works – and more mystical and mysterious in nature. I'd take A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, or some of the aphorisms from the Zürau book over his more famous works any day.

It's unfortunate that writers tend to be known for a single "brand" which causes off-brand works to be pushed to the side.

This is all a long way of saying that if you associate Kafka entirely with insurance administrators and oppressive bureaucracies and don't find this compelling, check out his shorter works.

farmeroy2• 3 years ago

100% agree. I think it does so much disservice to his work. But I also don't think The Trial is primarily about bureaucratic themes either. To me it is much more about K not being able to understand the society he inhabits and the rules which govern it, and that can be extended to bureaucracy, but also obviously religion and morality, and just a blanket search for meaning.

I also have read both the original German der Process and the English translation, and I feel that, even though German is my second language, the original has so much more terror and humor than the English version, which largely reads like a bureaucratic text itself. Understanding that Kafka would laugh out loud while reading his texts to his friend, I like to imagine his works to be a kind of interwar Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I love to imagine Josef K as Larry David.

staamen• 3 years ago

I had not made the connection myself yet but having just finished the german version (the only one I read), I now can't unsee Josef K as Larry David, it fits perfectly. I was very surprised, given it's reputation, how funny the book was.

In the book it is also pointed out more than once that Josef K's trial is not held in the "regular" court. Which to me indicates that the convoluted nature of the trial doesn't necessarily reflect on all bureaucracies, even if it's tempting to interpret it like that.

bena• 3 years ago

The other thing is that Josef K seems complicit in this process. At no point is he actively coerced into compliance. The system seems to not even care if he participates. I was constantly mentally screaming at the character, "Why the fuck are you doing this? You have a fucking choice."

So yeah, I think there's a degree of absurdity and irony in the works as well. Less, "look at this hellish version of reality" and more, "look at this dumbfuck going along with this".

bloak2• 3 years ago

Kafka has a prose style that is relatively easy to read, because he tends to describe concrete things rather than abstractions and does not use many unusual words or idioms, but hard to translate because he exploits the relatively free word order of German to write elegantly structured long sentences that don't seem complex in German but can easily become complex in translation.

I read Der Process in German, but I have also looked at one of the English translations, probably the one by Idris Parry, and I didn't like it much: it seemed rough, old-fashioned and generally hard to read compared with the original, though it's partly a matter of personal taste. Wikipedia mentions six English translation of The Trial but presumably some of them are cheaper and more easily available than others so the probability that we both looked at the same English translation are greater than one in six!

paulnpace2• 3 years ago

Where does The Metamorphosis fall into this? That is what I initially knew him for.

keiferski3• 3 years ago

That's a good question and I think a good illustration of what I was getting at RE: the problems with branding a writer with a single theme. Because I don't think The Metamorphosis could really be described as "kafkesque" in the bewildering bureaucratic sense, and yet it is probably one of his better-known works.

barbariangrunge3• 3 years ago

Not even Kafka got to write full time. Even the famous artists had to work a job and yet we still see posts every day about how greedy the art industries are

qazpot• 3 years ago

Kafka was not a famous writer at all or got rich due to his writing.

mariuolo• 3 years ago

And he asked a friend to destroy all of his writings after his death.

1970-01-012• 3 years ago

This was worth the click

     A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to it through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man he only accepts them "so that you do not think you have left anything undone". The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain entry to the law, but waits at the doorway until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why, even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years he has been there. The doorkeeper answers, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it"

the_king• 3 years ago

Thus the last and always unuttered slogan of modernity: no lives matter.

tiffanyg• 3 years ago

Ha! Dark, comparatively, I like it.

Of course, this is also wrong. Just as "X lives matter"* is wrong.

I doubt there's any pithy slogan that quite captures the reality of "what matters"**. Best I can do, personally, is point you towards the type of person who might be able to ... coalesce the vapor ... in such a way as to possibly produce a momentarily renewed sense of enlightenment***:

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec

* For any given value of X

** That may seem kind of absurd and stupid, but, I'm serious - there is complexity to the topic in part simply because a given human (and likely beyond) can generate / experience / believe that some "X matters", and we ARE a (miniscule, in multiple ways) part of the universe

*** Left "timestamp" off so setting / framework of scene is more comprehensible, skip to ~33s for "the meat"

barbariangrunge3• 3 years ago

A good quote, but where did you see it?

keiferski3• 3 years ago

It is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law

1970-01-012• 3 years ago

https://vienna.earth/plate/russell/before-the-law

angst_ridden• 3 years ago

My English teachers always taught Kafka largely on the depressing negativity of his writing. Yet he’d hold salons to read his work to friends, and they’d all roar with laughter (Kafka too). Absurdism can also be cathartic humor.

jprete• 3 years ago

Since (the public image of) Kafka seems incredibly depressing today, I’m very curious to learn more about what they found funny and what works were read.

elon_moist• 3 years ago

I didn't know this Vienna website. I scrolled through the author's profile, and it seems very cool - here's another blog from him about nurses - https://vienna.earth/plate/russell/nurse-shaddowing

pjungwir• 3 years ago

Wallace Stevens, perhaps America's greatest poet, also had a successful career working in insurance for decades. [1] is a nice short biography. It sounds like he was a committed & involved writer already before that though, and even he took some years off when he started the job and again after his daughter was born. So wherever you are, don't lose hope, but persist.

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens

mvncleaninst• 3 years ago

Metamorphosis was always particularly upsetting to read. Someone loses their ability to produce economic value and is portrayed as a literal insect

It reminds me of a cousin of mine who was struggling through some drugs and mental issues, hearing immediate family make a bunch of shitty remarks about him

Kafka is one of those authors that I try not to read because I'd prefer to have a rosier picture of human nature

Franz Kafka was a healthcare claims administrator and insurance underwriter

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