What We're Reading Now

Zombies: More Than Scary Monsters

17 June 2025

Geof read Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic. The book is a cultural analysis of the rise of the zombie monster as a metaphor for western cultures crisis of meaning.

Tags: geof read, mindfulness

Brains. Purpose. Meaning. Brains.

As a kid in the early 1980s, I grew up watching Godzilla movies on UHF TV. While the latex-costumed and model-heavy special effects are campy by today’s standards, Godzilla served as a powerful metaphor for the existential anxiety of the emerging nuclear age and the threat of nuclear warfare at the time. The first Godzilla film was released in 1954, a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is an example of “monster mythology.” Monster mythology suggests that horror and science fiction monsters do more than scare us; they serve as manifestations of cultural crises, fictitious mirrors of real-world fears.

Authors / researchers John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic introduce zombies as a current monster mythology in their book Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. For the authors, zombies symbolize a “crisis of meaning” in modern culture, much like Godzilla represented the threat of nuclear holocaust in the last century. For Vervaeke, zombies symbolize our loss of agency, a disconnection from purpose and meaningful narratives, and the erosion of shared values that once provided a shared social orientation. The zombie itself (not just the genre) represents a state of "mindlessness."

Zombies and the Existential Crisis

The rise in prevalence of the zombie archetype in literature (World War Z), film (28 Days Later), and TV (The Walking Dead) reflects a broader existential crisis in Western culture. With the decline of traditional frameworks (like religion) and the fragmentation of societal norms, we find ourselves adrift. The zombie, as a metaphor for modern Western culture, embodies this state of being, roaming without purpose. Not alive, and not dead. The book draws several comparisons based on zombie characteristics, including some that seem uncomfortably familiar:

• “Zombies don’t talk. They aren’t mute or reticent. They simply have no language. They have nothing to say.”
• “Zombies are communal. With a twist. They are communal creatures in that they vaguely share proximity, but there is no accord among them… They are in company, but not together. They are surrounded, but each alone.”
• “Zombies are homeless. A zombie simply ‘shuffles,’ bungles absently from one place to the next. Not belonging anywhere, being from anywhere…”
• “Zombies are untouchable. Touch is the arbiter of ‘real.’ Those with whom we are intimate are more real to us. The objects we have handled are more real to us. Emotions we have felt are more real to us.”

The Zombie Anecdote

Since the zombie archetype symbolizes mindlessness, alienation, and disconnection, Vervaeke suggests cultivating mindfulness as an antidote to these conditions.

In the book’s broader framework, mindfulness is linked to cultivating wisdom, a way of restoring cognitive and existential social coherence in our fragmented world. For Vervaeke, wisdom is self-knowledge and counters foolishness. “Foolishness is when your capacity to engage your agency and pursue your goals is undermined and threatened by self-deception and self-destructive behavior, which is a perennial vulnerability to your cognition.” Wisdom enables transcendence from the zombie state.

Specifically, we can use mindfulness to:

• Respond versus React: Zombies represent a state of automatic, reactive existence, driven by base impulses rather than purpose. Mindfulness fosters awareness, intentionality, and presence, helping individuals break free from passive and unconscious habits like social media consumption or TV binging.
• Restore Meaning Through Direct Experience: The book highlights the loss of meaning-making structures like religion, tradition, and community narratives that nurture connection. Mindfulness encourages direct engagement with lived experience instead of outsourcing meaning. Joining a club aligned with your goals or values and engaging in activities that align with your purpose are ways to foster a personal sense of purpose. As an aside, Vervaeke, in a panel discussion on the Philosophy for Our Times from the Institute of Art and Innovation, suggests this when searching for meaning / mattering: “Ask yourself these two questions. What do I want to exist even if I don't? And how much of a difference do I make to it? If you've got good answers to both of those, you have meaning in life. If you have only the first but not the second, you're seeking. You have neither.” Look for experiences that allow you to contribute to both of these questions.
• Separate the Signal from the Noise: Vervaeke frequently discusses how relevance realization and our ability to discern what is meaningful and significant is at the core of cognition. Relevance realization allows us to select and zero in on the information that is meaningful or useful for a goal out of an overwhelmingly vast sea of potential inputs. Mindfulness strengthens this faculty, helping us attune to what matters in a world where traditional structures are fading.

Vervaeke’s exploration of the meaning-crisis through the zombie mythology reveals a loss of traditional narratives forcing individuals to confront an existential void; combined with rapid technological and social changes that foster alienation and isolation; and the resulting cultural displacement that leaves us socially unanchored (without meaning or purpose). While Zombies in Western Culture is a thorough exploration of the zombie as metaphor for meaning crisis, we have to look at Verveake’s other works for a hopeful solution. Here is a link to the podcast I mentioned earlier, during which Verveake outlines a hopeful and optimistic POV on meaning making.

« Return to What We're Reading Now