One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from pleasant dreams, he found that nothing had changed from the day before. He went to the mirror at the end of his small room in his parent’s house and took stock. He was 5’6, an abysmal height, he felt. He was balding prematurely, limp wristed, lisping, duck footed, utterly charmless, stuttering, pathetic, lacking all conviction, concave-chinned, skinny fat, and full of sinister oils and microplastics and forever chemicals. He had a small penis. He was a virgin too, or at least he might as well have been.
“What has happened to me?” Gregor asked. He had always suspected that there was something horribly, horribly wrong with him, something monstrous and sinister, which prevented all progression in life. “I have missed a crucial, key step somewhere, probably in my childhood, something so crucial and so basic that most people never even notice having achieved it,” he thought with some regret. And so, it seemed the possibility for redemption was gone. The point of life was reduced to these insurmountable issues– there was no satisfaction in his sight, no real life to live at all.
Gregor, unsure of what to do, went to the internet. “It usually provides help and guidance,” he thought, familiar with the search function which had alternatingly assuaged and piqued his anxiety concerning many topics: politics, global annihilation, people he knew from high school. He lay belly up in his childhood twin bed, his old laptop electrically warming his crotch. Dazzled in the early morning darkness of his small room, he navigated many different variations of burning questions he had: how to be manlier, how to attract women, how to be more attractive, natural hair loss remedies, how to appear taller, natural penis lengthening– things of that sort.
First, on the internet he found others like him, despairing. Gregor read through bleak, terse characters, and unbroken walls of text of men very earnestly, in overwhelming tides of depression or anger, more than often both, recounting their situations of loneliness, stasis, and emptiness. Their detailing was meticulous, and their stories were heartbreaking. They left nothing unsaid. “Insufferable bugmen,” Gregor thought, momentarily disgusted.
Then, on other parts of the internet, he found what felt like answers, and he felt glad. One particular personality, T. Young, seemed to have a very good handle on things. His videos, podcasts, tweets, and posts were all very helpful to Gregor. First off, he insisted upon some basics. Things like making eye contact, maintaining good hygiene, keeping in shape, and dressing well were crucial. But moreover, Gregor was very attracted to his reputation and demeanor. Gregor knew women who had been alternatingly outraged by the statements T. Young espoused and vaguely charmed by his bolstered, confident demeanor, his casual humor, and, of course, his good looks. Any outrage against him, Gregor sensed, was largely performative or reactionary, he could tell by their smiles and giggles as they reproached men for watching his content– “Him? He’s awful, awful,” they would say incredulously, biting their lips and smirking. It was his daringness, his unabashed opinions on the state of modern sexual relations, which was so attractive to both genders. If he was reductive, it seemed to Gregor, it was because the truth was reductive. Even his body lacked complication. He was brutely muscular, broad, and tanned, strong-jawed. He dressed plainly and spoke firmly. His voice had no detectable accent.
Watching him made Gregor feel good and assured, and like he could finally envision a future for himself that was not miserable or nonexistent. “Maybe the world is something that can be won,” he thought. He got up off his back. He solved these problems; he could escape hell-- and he would. He would rest easy then once he had learned how to live.
He began with a hair tonic, Lion’s Spirit, which he purchased from an affiliate link on T. Young’s page for $115. It was a pharmaceutical cocktail which, through intense manipulation of hormonal processes, had been clinically proven to regrow scalp hair of Peruvian gorillas at a medically significant rate. He took Cialis for the resulting erectile dysfunction, and his erections for masturbating were stronger than ever. He signed up for a $400 a month Premium membership at the most expensive Muay Thai kickboxing CrossFit Primal Workout gym in his area, which included unlimited access to the gym’s spa, smoothie bar, and tanning beds. He studied ideal shoulder to waist ratios and the best exercises for aesthetic cultivation. He felt good and powerful when he bought this and decided he would train to kill. His penis would become larger through the natural lengthening therapy he had found on a Reddit forum, which was essentially the practice of jelqing. He bought platform shoes which subtly increased his height to an even 5 '9, which was respectable and even enviable, and he towered over the streets as he walked with them.
He signed up for T. Young’s dating master class, which included training on opening lines, seduction strategies, detachment techniques, and charisma. The basic idea was to engage women, posture elevated status and charm, then have sex with them.
So, the program was in place, and the world seemed to work for a while, very well, in fact, he decided. Gregor felt secure. He could deduce what was right and wrong, good and bad. He felt empowered.
And things went on like this for what felt like quite a while. He did not go to the gym as often as he would have liked– he went once, as a matter of fact, and found the entire experience slightly rattling and on the whole unpleasant. The exercises were difficult, slow and awkward, and he resented those around him who seemed to perform with ease. What was worse was the floor to ceiling mirrored wall which ran around the entire gym, the unavoidable, multi-directional eye of himself– his body, his slow, labored movements, his exhaustion and flaccidity, his face, his face, his face, his eyes. He said, later, sitting in the sauna which he had waited thirty minutes until it was empty to enter, feeling very ashamed, that he would give it a few days, and train at home until he was ready. “The gym is just as much a mental activity as a physical one.”
So he focused on the mental. He read books recommended to him by the internet– powerful instructive texts with titles like “Get Your Fucking Life Together” and “78 Laws to Social Success.” Gregor felt pride not only at the wise, prudent lessons these books imparted onto him, but also their sheer readability– he had finished five of them that month already, and that felt in and of itself a completion of a goal. As an addendum (and because it was, truly, a pleasure), he avidly watched T. Young’s entire back catalog of videos, as well as each new upload posted weekly– late into every night, basking in the glow of his laptop, accessing new parts of himself and the world.
One morning, as he went into the kitchen for his breakfast (a protein shake, raw milk, seven raw eggs, as T. Young suggested), his father, who he had not spoken to in some time despite their proximity, struck up a conversation with Gregor.
His father was a kind, gentle man: a real estate agent who had gotten married at 22. He asked Gregor about the recent charges to his bank account– he was proud Gregor had signed up for the gym and hinted that perhaps the expensive cosmetic materials were gifts for some secret, hidden romance. “I won’t ask!” his father said wryly, with obvious admiration in his eyes, holding his hands on his bald head. Gregor smiled back, semi-conscious but mainly formulating responses and reactions that were almost or completely fabricated– a total artifice, compiled of neutral cliches. In the end he settled for a simple, half nod. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, staring at him, seeing little to no resemblance.
Though he continued his program for success, problems began arising. Gregor looked in the mirror at the end of his small room and saw that things looked the same or worse than before. He saw his scalp, white and flaked with dandruff, through his thin, unruly black hair. His pills had stopped working, and the limpness of his penis– still too small, he felt, to deserve the sound effect of a flop. His platform shoes had produced crushing blisters in his ankles, crippling him to a hobble down the street. He was generally very ugly– essentially hideous. This seemed an inescapable, crushing fact, one he could not believe he had ignored or hoped to improve for even a second.
There were, of course, blights other than physical that he could identify (T. Young said hyper-focusing on one’s physical features was a “feminine trait,” and that physical beauty would occur as a byproduct of mental and spiritual clarity; though Gregor believed this to the extent that he did not question it, he could not suppress his disgust at himself, so immediate and so potent). He saw himself, in this mirror, clearly: a very small, solitary man, with a not incredible amount to offer the world, and just a few small things to want from it. He had nothing at all to say, nothing at all, and he would be agreeable, if not content, to mutely resign himself to eternal silence– whether towards women or otherwise, to anybody at all, because what was there to say, really, at the end of the day, besides idle, formless chatter, or weak cries of longing. “It’s not exactly hatred which is swelling and gurgling inside me right now,” he thought, resignedly. It was something else entirely, something like love.
He wondered then whether this way of life he was leading was really the best of all possible ways. He wondered, “Is this anxiety, this fixation on the physical, this loathing, this obsession truly good for me? Is there nothing else?”
Gregor took stock again, in a way that felt weightier, somehow more momentous than ever before. His world felt very small, dark, and dry. Gregor realized he valued nothing terribly important or tangible, and that probably his biggest passion in life was some vague notion of “self-improvement,” to which he could not necessarily describe or foresee an end goal besides perhaps having sex with more women.
He wondered about these women, those elusive, attractive creatures who seemed to operate on another plane of existence. He imagined having sex with them finally, these beautiful women, who, by some accident of fate and biology had been placed in the upper echelons of aesthetic society, who had for so long withheld access to their sexual organs from Gregor, either through malice, disgust, or simple, honest ignorance of his existence. He imagined the thrust, their shifting, jerking masses and jiggling breasts, then he thought about their orgasm, and after quickly masturbating, he thought about what would come next. Contempt? Emptiness? “What, then, is left for me?” he wondered. He saw the things he had surrounded his life with, dating courses, cosmetic products, unfulfilled physical transformations, as nothing, nothing at all. “Because, at the end of the day, I am alone,” he thought. Truly alone, in a sense that could not be altered. There were only dumb, blunt salves, veneers of protection, wearing off fast, and dramatically, leaving cracked ruins in a field– a thin, forgotten self. Gregor wished he could at least suffer out the rest of his days in peace, free from expectation.
If there was nothing else, which he was truly convinced of now, then his only option was humility. Gregor remembered teachings he had learned as a small child in church, things such as compassion, forgiveness, and virtue. He saw himself as part of a greater network of life, a higher order– something beautiful and strange, mystic but completely comprehensible, completely within himself. “This must be some kind of epiphany,” Gregor thought.
He fell asleep that night oddly content to commit himself to God and sanctity and pragmatism and humility– to something higher than himself, which required hard work, which would give him legitimate purpose. He fell asleep happy.
Gregor woke up the next morning to find that he had slept for thirteen hours. Then, with not a small amount of alarm, he realized his Tinder date was soon. Though T. Young had said dating apps were only worth it if you were among the top one percent of men, Gregor did not see any other obvious ways to meet women besides coldly approaching them on the street, which seemed impossible, so he had downloaded one anyway. He had chosen a photo of himself from a time he could barely remember now, when he was not so unhappy, when his skin was not so bug-like, his eyes not so dead.
Stephanie, a girl who had been one of his few matches, was supposed to grab a coffee with him at eleven. A beautiful girl, he thought, from the pictures on her profile. A girl who was “shamelessly addicted to tiktok,” and “looking for a guy with a silly side to have a good time.” Their message exchange had been short. He had learned this terseness from T. Young. “I hope she isn’t disappointed,” Gregor thought on the car ride over, before bolstering himself against this thought “It does not matter, I know what I am.”
It was only then, looking in the rearview mirror to check his appearance, did Gregor remember the covenant he had made between himself and God the night before. “That’s all well and good,” he thought, “but I too need to live in this world.” He did not want to look in the mirror anymore.
At the coffee shop, Gregor Samsa waited and breathed deeply, and cursed himself– partially because he had just remembered that T. Young had said that coffee shops were one of the worst places to take a date (it betrayed low status)-- but mainly because he was nervous and afraid, though he did not want to be.
“All I’ve watched, all I’ve paid for, all I’ve done has led up to this. And the best part is, it means nothing to me. If I fuck her, that’s great, but if not, it means nothing to me. I can go home at any moment, and it will just be myself, just me and myself, and that’s not loneliness, but a certain, strange kind of strength. But I will be taking this girl home with me, at some point, this strange, simple girl, who I do not know, and all of this will truly begin coming into play.”
She never did come. It did not come unannounced. At 11:15, Stephanie sent a quick, cutting apology– she cited a “huge personal matter.” She did not offer to reschedule. “I’m sorry! :( ”
Gregor, on the verge of tears after seeing this, felt incredibly pathetic and very superfluous and unwieldy. He looked around the coffee shop and saw the world had not stopped for his tragedy and had dutifully left him behind. He looked around more and saw a girl, a pretty girl, sitting at a table across the shop, on her phone.
He walked over near her and peaked at what she was looking at, saw she was scrolling some sort of feed, then walked back to his seat. He tried to think of something to say that was tangentially related to some shared idea– the coffee, the phone, social media, the weather. He tried hard to remember T. Young’s words and they failed to come to him. He glanced over at her once, then again, and the third time he stared until she looked up from her phone and caught his gaze, which he immediately broke with a rapid head turn, as if he was merely perusing the room.
Gregor got up from his chair and walked across the store, planning to approach, feeling that maybe the words would simply come to him. He looked in a mirror behind the counter and thought his head was far too small for his body. It would not happen, he decided, or rather felt, passively. In the end, no real contact was achieved, and the opportunity itself was null from the beginning– there were only vague gestures into nothingness. Gregor left alone.
He left his car near the shop and walked around the area, a small main market area which opened up into wide, empty, beautiful residential streets. He thought again about his commitment to humility and sanctity, and, after reviewing the past few weeks and this most recent incident, decided he would pursue it, but did not feel the same happiness or contentment he had felt before. “I’m more or less forced into this situation by unforeseen, unwanted circumstances. If I could, I would be beautiful forever, careless and ignorant and sometimes cruel but capable of tender, erotic acts of longing and beauty,” he thought, somewhat sadly, but overall, assuredly. “I’m just trying to get along.”
He thought about this while walking through the streets and felt calm. He saw his known world and beliefs recede away, directly in front of him, moving as if it were a knowing tide, something aloof and absurd, something strange outside of his control. “I guess I thought there’d be more dignity with this whole thing, this whole life.”
At the end of the day, Gregor Samsa felt a bit stupid and suffered, but also, more strongly, he felt the sun warm upon him, and the air, and the clouds, and the sky, and the grass, and other such things. The objectivity of the world remained despite him, and into this he retreated, happy, or at least relieved, to do so. Happy and dumb like the concrete receiving rain.