You're watching another zombie movie. The survivors barricade themselves in, weapons ready, terrified of the shambling horde outside. You root for them. I did too, for years.
But what if you're not the survivor?
What if you're the one shambling through life, going through the motions, following routines that no longer make sense—and calling it normal?
What if you're already dead—but nobody taught you how to tell the difference?
The Trap You're Already In
Every morning you wake up and perform. You put on the costume for a play you never auditioned for, speak lines you never wrote:
"Thank you for this opportunity."
"I'm passionate about our mission."
"Let's circle back on that."
You've gotten so good at this performance that you've forgotten it's not you.
You know that feeling when you're in a meeting and suddenly hear yourself using corporate speak—synergize, move the needle, circle back—and for a split second you feel like you're watching someone else wear your face? That's the moment the performance becomes visible.
But here's what's unsettling: you know it's a performance. You've always known. And yet you keep showing up, keep playing the role, keep pretending that pretending is living.
You check your phone (performing engagement), drink your coffee (performing alertness), commute to work (performing purpose). You smile at your boss (performing gratitude), laugh at their jokes (performing camaraderie), nod along to meetings that could have been emails (performing value). You buy things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't like (performing success).
Everyone around you is performing too. You all know it. You can see it in their eyes during the all-hands meeting—that look that says we're all pretending this matters. You're all trapped in the same script, competing for roles in a play that's killing you slowly.
The zombie bite isn't infection. It's the moment you stop performing.
And that—that moment of authenticity—is what the system calls madness.
The Horde You've Been Taught to Fear
Look around your office during the next all-hands meeting. Everyone's nodding along like players who know the coach's pep talk is nonsense but can't risk being benched. You're all on the same struggling team, but you've been taught to compete with your teammates instead of questioning why the game is rigged.
You know that feeling when your company sends another email about "unprecedented times" while posting record profits? When they ask you to "think like an owner" while paying you like a renter? That's not cognitive dissonance. That’s the system working exactly as designed.
The zombie horde that terrifies movie audiences isn't mindless at all. It's a mass of people who've stopped playing the game, stopped responding to propaganda, stopped believing that working harder will save them. They can't be reasoned with because they've seen through the lies. They can't be bought off because they've rejected the currency. They can't be threatened because they've already lost everything the system told them to value.
What makes them zombies is that they've stopped pretending.
And that—authenticity itself—is what power fears most.
The Story You've Been Told
I'm going to tell you something that took me years to see, and it's going to hurt the way all necessary truths hurt:
Those zombie movies we grew up loving? They're teaching us to fear the very people who have the most legitimate reasons to be angry.
You thought those were just monster stories. But every monster story encodes a specific fear that society can’t name directly. And the zombie? It’s about what happens when the exploited refuse to stay dead.
The zombie myth didn’t emerge from your imagination. It came from Haiti—from the terror colonizers felt when enslaved Africans did the impossible in 1804. They overthrew their masters and established the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
To the plantation owners watching their world burn, this was the ultimate nightmare: the dead rising up, the property reclaiming its humanity, the system’s victims organizing into something unstoppable.
The zombi in Vodou tradition represented a person stripped of their will through spiritual violence. But that’s not the horror that traveled north. The real horror was the revelation that people could stop believing they deserved to be treated as less than human.
By the time Hollywood sanitized these fears into entertainment, the revolutionary context had been erased. The horde became faceless. The uprising became mindless. The revolution became infection.
We’ve been sitting in darkened theaters, unconsciously rehearsing the colonizer’s perspective.
The Choice You're Making Right Now
The choice is already being made, in small moments you might not even notice. Every morning when you get up and perform your role, every time you smile at exploitation and call it opportunity, every moment you compete with other struggling people instead of questioning why there isn’t enough to go around—you’re choosing.
The “bite” of consciousness operates differently across lines of race, gender, and class.
A Black worker faces both economic exploitation and racial violence.
Undocumented immigrants risk deportation for organizing.
Women navigate sexual harassment and wage theft.
Queer workers balance economic and social survival.
Systems that concentrate power use these divisions to prevent unity—keeping everyone fighting each other instead of recognizing who benefits from the arrangement.
But when people refuse to compete for scraps—when they choose solidarity—something dangerous happens.
As bell hooks understood, it’s not just about rejecting oppression. It’s about choosing to care for each other as an act of rebellion.
Your phone’s facial recognition. Your keycard access. Your credit score. These systems promise safety while enforcing isolation. They're offering you a spot on the barricade—in exchange for shooting into the crowd.
Fortresses of Denial
Just as colonial powers built forts to contain Haiti’s revolution, the wealthy build new barriers against awakening.
Most zombie media frames these fortified enclaves as humanity’s last hope. But if the bite represents awakening, these “safe zones” are actually fortresses of denial—temporary islands in a rising flood of consciousness.
Think about it:
Dawn of the Dead’s shopping mall? Safety through consumption.
Corporate towers? Safety through hierarchy.
Gated communities? Safety through exclusion.
What they’re really protecting is wealth concentration, resource hoarding, and illusions of safety.
But the gates are failing. The people who serve coffee, clean floors, and deliver packages? They’re seeing through it. And that recognition spreads faster than any wall can hold.
What You Do Now
This isn’t a conspiracy. Ideology works through repetition. Writers create what sells. Audiences want what soothes. Fear gets embedded in stories and we swallow it whole.
If entertainment didn’t shape reality, why would governments and corporations spend billions on propaganda and messaging?
We’ve already seen it:
Protesters described as hordes.
Strikers as disruptive.
Movements for justice as madness.
The horde is already here.
Record depression, "deaths of despair," and falling life expectancy aren’t accidents. They're system outcomes.
Some still perform because they must. But they're waiting. Not for saviors. They're waiting to see who else stops pretending.
You Have a Choice
Haiti’s revolution was bloody, painful—and also a radical assertion of human dignity. Other uprisings have shown: when systems collapse, it’s often the most dismissed people who prove capable of imagining something new.
You have a choice to make. Right now.
You can close this tab and go back to the performance.
Or you can admit: the apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s already here.
And the real zombies? They're not mindless. They’re waking up.
The only question is:
Will you keep pretending?
Or will you join us?