The Modern Zombies

I was inspired to write this piece by a recent writing by Isabell Abbott on Spell of Survival.

In her writing she connects the Zombie’s symbology with our current times.

We have become the modern zombies.

We push carts, push gurneys, push ourselves through schedules that allow no pause.

We move from task to task as if movement itself were proof of life.

We follow routines we barely notice anymore.

Walking like automatons, eyes forward, bodies compliant, souls elsewhere.

Alerts. Metrics. Quotas. Instructions.

These shape the rhythm of our days more than desire, more than attention, more than care.

Something is moving, yes.

But it is not presence.

This is animation without intention.
Hunger without pleasure.

Consumption divorced from satisfaction.

And day after day, year after year we keep going.

Not because we want to.

But because stopping would require feeling what has been deferred for too long.

What we rarely name is the grief underneath this motion.

The grief of lives lived at a tempo we did not choose.

The grief of days spent responding rather than arriving.

We are not lazy.

We are exhausted.

We are not distracted by accident.

We are trained, slowly, politely, efficiently, away from our own signals. Away from our own tempo.

The body learns to obey calendars before it learns to trust sensation.

The nervous system learns urgency before safety.

Time becomes a boss. Productivity becomes morality.

Stillness becomes suspicious.

So we adapt.

We narrow.

We leave just enough of ourselves behind to function.

This is not failure.

It is survival.

But, what is that quiet, unreasonable longing that keeps knocking?

Not for more efficiency, or better habits, or another optimisation.

But for contact.

For a pause that does not demand justification.

For a breath that is not a reset but a return.

For the feeling of being inside one’s own life again.

This is why you read pieces like this.

Not to learn something new.

But to remember something old.

That we are not machines that broke.

We are humans who adapted.

That numbness is not absence of care.

It is care that had nowhere safe to land.

That beneath the zombie walk, beneath the schedules and screens and compulsive motion, there is still a pulse.

Still a song.

What we feel inside does not stop at the skin.

We broadcast it into rooms, meetings, relationships, systems.

A regulated body changes a space.

An absent one does too.

The question is not why am I so tired?

The question is: “What has my body learnt it must ignore in order to survive my days?”

What would it take to listen again?

Listening does not begin with quitting everything.

Or moving to the woods.

Or becoming someone else.

It begins smaller.

More dangerously.

With noticing the moment the body tightens.

The breath that shortens.

The hunger that is not for food.

With reclaiming attention as a moral act.

With treating presence not as a luxury, but as a form of resistance.

This is not a call to wake up and do more.

It is an invitation to come back and be.

To let the body lead again.

To allow intention to return to movement.

To choose rhythm over acceleration.

Contact over compliance.

Because we were never meant to live as animation without intention.

We were never meant to consume without satisfaction.

We were never meant to persist without pleasure.

We are not a zombie.

We are a human who forgot (temporarily) that your aliveness matters.

And the remembering?

It starts now.

Quietly.

In the body.

This short poem is to help us all remember.

Body still walking,

Days moving without me.

Under the noise, a small ache

asks to be touched.

Not tired, 

untuned.

Motion everywhere.

I stop for a beat.

The world doesn’t collapse.

I come back to me.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us here.  A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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