Zombification

There is a pandemic going on. And it is worse than any kind of biological virus. In this document, I will try to record the world as it was on date 20.09.2020, for future historians to research - should there even be a future, that is. I’m not so sure.

The world is plagued by zombies, and they are real. Not like those sci-fi ones from TV-shows or video games, where you see dudes wearing makeup and torn T-shirts, raspberry syrup dripping from the corner of their mouths. No, the zombies that are roaming planet Earth in the 21st century are horrifyingly real and they wear no such indication of their infection. Some of them are obviously infected, whilst others hide it well. One of them could be sitting in the very next room and you wouldn’t even know it. 

The zombies of today do not thirst for brains - though a case could be argued that they lack one - but they thirst for more of the things that make them zombies. It has become a self-sustaining positive feedback loop, where the number of these creatures keeps growing and their condition keeps deteriorating at a faster and faster rate, with each next generation. 

And it’s the most brilliant thing! The ‘virus’ that produces these zombies is not only contagious and quickly spreading - it is also widely available and easily accessible. What’s more, people don’t even avoid it. They want to get infected by it. They even pay for it, train their children to adopt it, and spread it around like it is the most rational thing to do. It’s like putting on your swimming suit and jumping in a pool of used heroin needles, thinking you’re doing acupuncture.

To get a sense of what I’m saying, I’ve compiled a list of various types of zombies that are out there. I’ve spent the last 25 years compiling this list, drawing the conclusions from my personal experience with these creatures, as well as talking to others with various degrees of infection and those who’ve managed to keep healthy. Before I start listing, I want to point out that chances are high you have been infected too - I know I have been - depending on what era you read this in. Perhaps in the future, this problem would have been solved. Hopefully.

The most obvious types of zombies are also the most wide-spread ones. They’re what I call ‘smartphone zombies’. You can see them walking aimlessly around the streets, inside shopping malls, hospitals, and schools, driving in cars and busses, hiking in the mountains, strolling through museums, sitting at the theatre, and practically anywhere else and everywhere in between. The smartphone zombie type is quite harmless and that’s the only reason I prefer them to other types. They just exist and that’s that. They don’t do anything, save for sitting or walking slowly, while their eyes are glued to the phones in their hands, thumbs fiddling over the screen. You can easily recognize them by the ‘broken neck syndrome’, slouched shoulders, and bruises on their foreheads, as they often collide with objects, paying no attention to their environment.

Next, we’ve got ‘news and media’ zombies. These often go hand in hand with the smartphone ones, but there is one big difference. The latter ones react to the news, while the first seem apathetic to everything. The news and media zombies also use smartphones, and they get their perception of reality from what the pixels tell them. They live by the news and for the news, following the stream of unconscious misinformation and obscured facts that are presented to them. These types of zombies are often depressed, anxious, scared, aggressive, and righteous. If I can, I steer way clear of them. I’d hate to get infected.

Moving on we have school and college zombies. These are the products of previous generations of zombies, training and preparing a new generation, which will in turn train and prepare a new one and so on. To what end that is, I don't know. But the school and college type of zombie is a very annoying and sometimes quite obnoxious one. Much like the news and media zombies, they too believe in what they are being told, either by the institutions of training or by their other zombie friends. Of course, they too use smartphones. A lot. They look at pixels on average more than they do at the real world. Now, granted, pixels are part of the real world too, but a symbol of a thing is not the thing itself, so this type of zombie is effectively training to delude itself. 

Some school and college zombies have higher aspirations. They want to get healthy, but the other zombies mob around them and ‘cough the virus onto them’, so to speak. You can easily spot this type of zombie. They’re usually the ones with the most to say, moving about the world with the most energy and vigor. They are also quite often aggressive. If they’re not too apathetic already.

Closely related and most often directly followed, are the work zombies. Now, these I pity. They are the culmination of the zombification process, as I call the training of zombies, and they are the slaves of the zombie world. You will see them living a life of constant stress and bitterness, doing something they were told to do just so they can live for one more month and do it all over again until they either drop dead or become too sick to keep it up. The older ones of this type can get very obnoxious and aggressive at times, and are toxic to be around. I’d advise you to stay clear.

Next, we have a big group of zombies which I call ‘ideological zombies’. This group can be broken down further to many subgroups, but I have determined three larger ones amongst them. These are; politics, religion, science, and spirituality zombies. These are the zombies that are really scary and that really crawl under my skin. You will see them with and without smartphones, so they can be tricky to identify at times. But what will always give them out is when you have a conversation with them - there are certain things they do that reveal them to a careful observer. Just beware not to get infected!

Ideological zombies will always have a point or an argument that they will try to defend and project onto you, no matter what the reality is. If they believe it is true, they will deny and reject all contrary information - their belief and ideology is supreme in their minds and should be enforced. These zombies are dangerous. They are the chief catalysts for war and conflict amongst the zombie community. 

They are also the ones who invented the zombification of humanity that plagues my world. Ideology is the source, I have found, of this pandemic. It is the virus that has taken over the world and is running rampant in the 21st century. And as blatant and obvious a virus it sometimes is, it can also be very sneaky and subtle at times, taking ordinary people by surprise and turning them into zombies.

For instance, in politics, ideological zombies only see one supreme way of doing things and will argue and justify its supremacy with tanks and nukes if needed, presenting it as a good thing. Liberating the world of injustice, while enforcing their own idea of justice, which is, ‘just-us’.

In religion, the ideology and dogma of religious zombies are obvious. They have been indoctrinated into a certain culture and tradition, infected most often at a very young age. The zombification of religion turned it from a well-meaning form of personal liberation to a system for controlling the masses of zombies.

Science zombies are the same as religion zombies. They too have been indoctrinated into a system and a way of thinking passed onto them by other zombies. They present their zombification as the purging of ignorance in place of truth. Only they do not see that the truth they provide is corrupted, tainted by the ideology virus because they are zombies.

Spirituality zombies believe they have found the cure (well, pretty much every ideology zombie believes they have found the cure). But what they have found in reality is just another form of zombification, one of ‘positive thoughts’ and ‘nothing matters anyway’. 

I have found ideological zombies to be the most dangerous as they mislead both other zombies as well as yet uninfected people towards what they think is the cure. But a zombie cannot find a cure for itself unless it realizes it is a zombie, which is like with the fish in the water. The fish doesn’t recognize it lives in water - it perceives the water to be everything there is and the only thing there is. Until a fisherman comes along and yanks it out of the sea. Then, the fish realizes it lived in a fantasy its whole life. 

These are just the main types of zombies I have found and thought to record as I think they represent the 21st century quite well - for the most part. The zombification process itself is not new, however. Even though I have given recent examples, the zombification has been going on for a long, long time. It is as old as civilization itself. And it makes sense, you see, when large groups of humans started coming together, and their attention could turn from gathering food and worrying for sheer survival to thinking about themselves, great things started to happen. 

Humanity started domesticating themselves.

Started improving their chances and methods of survival.

Zombification was invented - the indoctrination and teaching from an older, established group of zombies, to their young and naive children. “The world is such and such…” 

I realize this was a necessary thing to do; without it, humanity would have never survived in the wilds. But it is a tool, a means to an end and not the end in itself. I think we have long outgrown that tool. It’s become blunt, outdated, and quite frankly, old.

The times we live in right now are not suited for zombification - physical survival is no longer a problem. If humanity is to move forward we need to pick up more refined tools than ideology to explore our world and ourselves. We need to adopt new tools, ones fit for the fine and delicate work of raising our awareness and understanding of ourselves as zombies.

Only when we realize that we are zombies, can we start the work necessary to find the cure. And the cure is, I think, individual to each zombie. If it were the same for everybody, well, isn’t that exactly what ideology is about? Spreading your idea of how things should be to everyone?

Anyway, I hope this document helps. I wish I could write it in more detail, list all the types of zombies that are out there, as I’m sure I’ve missed a lot. But I can already hear them pounding at my door, I can see the light from their smartphones through my window. 

They’re coming…

They want to zombify me.

God help us all...