Being Human

I know I write about myself quite a bit—usually just about my observations. What I am going to write about this time is very personal. Well, not about me per se, but about how what I am experiencing is affecting me. Maybe some of you are observing and feeling something similar, in your own personal way, or maybe not. I am curious to know, so make sure you tell me.

I think I am becoming inhuman.

Maybe to say becoming “non-human” is more accurate. But essentially this transition will eventually result in being “inhuman”—the first steps toward zombiehood.

I can explain some of this with rather broad, and typically obvious, examples. Then some other ways are more subtle and personal. I will get to those soon enough. Let me start at the beginning. At least with what we might all agree were some of the first examples of what has been causing us to zombify.

The course of natural human social evolution (as opposed to physical evolution, like growing a third arm in a million years, or something like that) has led us into some pretty useless and dangerous stuff—like the atomic bomb for example, or cell phones for that matter (which of the two is ultimately more dangerous?) I could write a book about these things, as I am sure you could as well. These two recent examples, however, may not be due to a natural evolution, but primarily due to the gentle (and currently not so gentle) agenda. What is the goal of the agenda? I won’t bore you with my explanation, I am certain you already know, and besides, the details regarding the agenda’s primary function are not really important. All that is important is to know it isn’t pretty, and it will end, if successful, with a planet pretty much devoid of life. But I digress.

I cannot pinpoint the time when natural social evolution gave way to the agenda’s nefarious and evil coercion. Maybe it was around the time of the industrial revolution. If not then, possibly earlier, but not much later. It has been around for a while. All of this is really “book material” and I do not want to get bogged down in these details. I just want to be clear that the zombifying effects of our current times are not a result of natural human social evolution—I don’t think we are so lame a species as to evolve into our own destruction. Of course, there is an argument here that the agenda is a result of our own “Godless” wanderings, but I won’t open that can of worms either.

So, what in hell am I talking about?

This has been a very slow drain. Slow enough that even us shrews may not notice what is happening to us. As I said, it has been going on for a while, it all started so long ago, in fact it may have been a rather natural occurrence to begin with­­­­—before the agenda took it over. These sorts of things came about when humans started to remove themselves from their creations. The things we dealt with every day started to be manufactured rather than be handmade. I think we rolled with all this rather well because we found other ways to interact as human beings. We gathered, we played sports, we worked together, we played together. Even though most “things” we came in contact with were made by machines, we compensated. And although this did start to have a negative impact on our “humanness” we hardly noticed.

As I go back into my own memories, I recall a bookstore in North Hollywood I used to frequent. This was way before Amazon, and even before the internet. It was one of those “homegrown” sort of places, in an old building with nooks and crannies where you would find old mysterious books piled up in teetering stacks because there was no room on the shelves. I used to spend hours in there, often asking the owner where I might find books on a particular subject. He, of course, always knew where they could be found and often made reading suggestions. Then Amazon came. Poof, like a fairy-house in the woods, the bookshop was gone. It just vaporized, and one day was no longer there.

But Amazon is much better, eh? Nearly any book published is there, and you don’t have to browse through a bunch of musty books. You don’t have to walk or drive there either, and there is nothing to touch, or feel, and no one to talk to. There is no comfy little corner where you can sit in a big plush overstuffed chair while it rains outside and read some interesting book you discovered. Nope. But Amazon is better, isn’t it?

Now, how many little, seemingly insignificant things like that can I list here before running out of space? Any sort of mom-and-pop store, of course, these have been disappearing by the droves and nearly all gone since the spamdemic took its final blow. How about “in-person” conferences, workshops, conventions? I travelled to England twice for a Crop Circle conference I attended before Covid—with plans to attend more in the future. What a glorious, human nurturing, experience. Now the conference is entirely online. Forced there to start with, but now there for convenience and because it is cheaper for everyone. Same experience? Far from it. But the objective, quantifiable, information received is the same, so that seems to be all that matters. How about Zoom sessions taking the place of just about any sort of human gathering? Work, therapy, doctor’s visits. My whole profession (psychotherapy) has gone in that direction. Of all things, psychotherapy online??? Really? 

Oh my, this list could take a while to convey here. You fill in the blanks . . . restaurants (Uber Eats), educational courses, universities, high school, all manner of education, gaming (no one plays in the street anymore, it is all online) AI, synthetic music, synthetic art . . . I am just throwing stuff out off the top of my head. Again, this list could be miles long.

And no one cares. Most people don’t even notice. Working at home is so convenient, Zoom is so convenient, shopping online is so convenient. Need I say more?

So what? Mark my words, this will kill us. It is killing me, I know that. I am slowly fading into it all, like falling asleep in a snowbank. I am really aware of this stuff, but it is dehumanizing me as well because I unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, succumb to it—it is just so easy. I don’t go to concerts anymore or to the theatre. I eat out very seldom, when in the past I would have coffee and a muffin at a little French café in Burbank, California, every Sunday. Just to be there, just to feel the weather (sitting outside) just to talk to the waitstaff, just to FEEL through my human senses. All gone.

Zombification.

It’s real, and just like the body snatchers, it will snatch your soul when you least expect it.