In the grand spectacle of modern life, we're all unwittingly starring in our own zombie movie. Picture this: the streets are teeming with people, but their eyes are glazed over, fixed on the glowing screens clutched in their hands. They shuffle along, oblivious to the world around them, like a horde of the undead in search of their next digital fix.
Instead of moaning for brains, these zombies groan for Wi-Fi. They roam the concrete jungles, lured by the siren call of social media notifications and endless streams of cat videos. Their fingers twitch with anticipation, ready to swipe and scroll their way through another mind-numbing cycle of memes and selfies.
Meanwhile, the real world crumbles around them, neglected and forgotten. Relationships wither and die as conversations are replaced by emojis and hashtags. Basic survival skills are abandoned in favor of mastering the latest mobile game or perfecting the art of the tik tok dance .
But perhaps the most terrifying part of this dystopian nightmare is that we're all infected. No one is immune to the lure of technology, and even the most resolute among us find ourselves succumbing to its addictive charm.
The very neurology of our brains has been altered, especially in three key neural pathways: the Mesocortical (related to cognition, memory, emotional behavior, and learning), Nigrostriatal (related to movement and sensory stimulation), and Mesolimbic (related to pleasure, reward-seeking behaviors, addiction, emotion, and perception).
Practically all neural pathways related to some of the most fundamental skills have been affected—yay for short attention spans!
With evolution, one might expect our ability to think to increase. But voilà! Our ability to NOT think has increased instead. We all know people's dopamine levels have been fervently dancing with the rise of the internet, but by how much?
Let's take an example: Suppose you see an enjoyable post on Instagram—ding! There goes the spike of dopamine. Soon, you scroll past it and come across a less engaging post, and you think, "Eh, not interested." But if you had come across that post earlier, there's a possibility that you would have enjoyed it, maybe even learned something from it. What is my Point ? Your perception of reality is being controlled albeit this was a just a trivial example .
Dopamine is at the root of all our actions; it determines how we view different activities. It's critical to our perception of reality. And this perception is increasingly influenced by the internet, social media per se. We have been implanted with an artificially generated hunger that preys on our evolutionary needs for validation, self-esteem, acceptance, and tech companies have exploited it wonderfully.
The internet has become our feeding ground, where extreme disagreements rage like never before. Just as zombies see people only as food, we've started to view others through the distorted lens of their opinions and disagreements. This subtle polarization and oversimplifications of situations and people have given rise to a whole generation of virtue signalers. It's as if every dissenting comment or opposing viewpoint triggers a hunger pang, driving us to devour more and more content.
An interesting analogy was given by author Ashley Dotty Charles. It was along the lines of how 50 years ago, if you told people to put their head in the oven, it would be considered dangerous and stupid, but now you could call it the #ovenchallenge, and everyone will jump on this bandwagon of stupidity.
Thirty percent of babies know how to use a tablet before they can even speak; it's becoming increasingly evident that we're all slowly turning into digital zombies and even raising them .
Just like a cigarette fitting snugly in your pocket, we find ourselves reaching for our screens whenever anxiety strikes, our focus narrowing to the glow of pixels. An average person checks their phone 52 times a day, and when they try to quit this habit, cortisol sweeps in, the king of stress hormones making it even worse.
There's been more than enough discourse on the need for balance when it comes to the digital world, yet things only seem to be getting worse. In the midst of all the discourse surrounding the need for balance in our digital lives, it seems like we're unwittingly starring in the greatest zombie movie ever made.
The cast? Us, the actors, gradually morphing into the very zombies we've been watching on screen. The irony? We are devouring our own brains
or at least....allowing it to be devoured .
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