Our World

So much ado about zombies lately.  It seems they're everywhere; not walking our streets, but sprinkled throughout literature, films, television, video games, you name it.  Each author provides their own take on the zombie apocalypse, but what are all these stories really getting at?  What do they tell us about life and what it means to be alive?  I see all of these zombie stories as a wake-up call to the world.  Whether a conscious or subconscious one, there’s no doubt that zombie fiction asks us to question what it means to be alive, and what it means to be human.

                Apocalyptic zombie settings usually consist of a world that is run by zombies.  They may not be making choices, or consciously trying to run the world, as humans do, but they have the numbers, and they are in control.  People in these stories are the ones who are on the run, even the ones who put up a fight still have to account for the potential dangers that the zombies represent.  Humans are forced to scrounge for food and find a way to scrape out a living in the safest place they can find.  Shelters are seldom ideal; take the school from This is Not a Test, or the prison that Rick and his crew call home in The Walking Dead.  No one would ever choose to live in either of these places unless they absolutely had to.  However, they put up with it and try to make the best out of it because it’s all they can do.  The zombies have driven them out of their comfortable homes and out of their places of work and productivity to scavenge and hide.

                A zombie era marks the end (or at least the temporary end) of the human’s world.  Although humans may still inhabit a zombie world, they are no longer the ones in charge.  If you look at the world around us today, it is unquestionably one that is dominated by people, and the image of the kind of world we’ve chosen to live in.  Before humans there were no skyscrapers, or amusement parks, no factories or neighborhoods.  Every tangible building is the result of a person’s idea coming to life.  This is quite literally, our world.  Somewhere along the lines, it seems as though we’ve lost sight of the incredible fact that we’re in control and we can make this world whatever we want it to be.  We have collectively chosen to make it a world of war, divided by castes and class, where some live big while others suffer.  Additionally, we have the technology to make every car electric, we have the capabilities to mass produce alternative energy sources, but we choose not to.  They are being integrated into the system it seems, but slowly, and perhaps too late.  At least in a world of zombies, the Earth can take a breath of fresh air, a welcome break from the constant force of pollution.  Given what we’re capable of achieving, and the kind of world we could potentially live in, the state of our current world leaves a lot to be desired.

There are countless problems, and although the people in charge are capable of thinking and problem solving, one wouldn’t know it by the world in which we live.  One might even say that we’ve become mindless creatures, repeating the same routine every day, as if stuck on autopilot.  When you take a step back and look at people, we all follow such a similar formula.  We go to school as long as we can stand it (or afford it), then it’s time to get a job so that we can spend the rest of our lives paying off the debt we’ve accrued while attending school to find a job in the first place.  Once your debt’s paid off, it’s time to save until you have enough to retire and wait for your body to give out and send you out of here.  Seldom does anyone break this monotonous loop and find something they truly love.  Those who do are able to find fulfillment, which is true happiness.  Most people settle for plan B or plan C and are content to get by, going through the motions like the majority of the world.  That’s not what life should be about.  Life should be about living, not just existing.  The beauty of the zombie world is that it weeds out all those who are unwilling to actually fight for their life, for their happiness.  It forces people to face death and if they want to live, they have to earn it.  They have to choose to survive, to fight for their right to live.  Paying off mortgages, working a desk job that requires 8 hours of filing useless reports, and all the other meaningless shit that we’ve built up to be important flies right out the window when zombies arrive and shake things up.  Zombies show us what it means to be truly alive and in control of the world.  No one likes a world run by the mindless undead.  So if we can take anything away from all the zombie literature that’s come out recently, let it be that this is our world and our life.  Don’t waste it floating by on autopilot.  Take control and don’t just exist; live.