Of course, research into the world of the “zombie at rest” is not as plentiful as into that of the “zombie on the rampage.” Nonetheless, there is evidence enough to suggest that when zombies are not “on” (that is, there are no humans around to eat), they exist in a world of quiet, dignified fellowship. There is no argument or hate speech in this world, or speech at all. There is nothing like a police force in the world of zombies, because there is no crime to necessitate it.
Many different positive qualities combine in zombies to form this ideal society of peace, but perhaps no one more so than this:
Zombies do not hold grudges.
You know the phrase “Like water off a duck’s back?” It should be more like “Like a grudge off a zombie’s desiccated flesh.” No one shrugs things off like the zombified.
Don’t think for a moment that zombies live in some ideal fantasy world, either. They live in the same world as you or me, full of disappointments, dashed hopes, and kingsized letdowns. There’s been no research into whether zombies feel disappointment now and then—but if they do, they don’t show it.
A zombie’s world revolves around brains.
So, really, the only thing one zombie might do to offend another is to eat a human’s brain first, before any other zombies can. When your whole day revolves around trying to find and eat brains, you’d think this would be a crushing letdown for a zombie. Imagine it. You’ve had this fleeing human in your sights for hours, chasing it all around an abandoned mall. Then, just when you’ve got it cornered, one of your zombie buddies jumps in out of nowhere and beats you to the prize.
The thing is, this scenario happens all the time in the world of zombies, and yet no zombie-on-zombie resentment ever foments. Zombies frequently work in groups to break down storm doors, crash through plate glass, and corral humans into abandoned buildings. Most of the time, only a few of the zombies involved actually get to enjoy the spoils of the horde’s efforts. Many times, the zombies who do the most work (breaking windows, dodging vehicles, getting shot at) have the least success when its time to actually eat a brain or two.
Yet remarkably, no zombie is deterred by this prospect, even as it occurs time and time again.
And apparently, no zombie feels jealousy toward the ones who do feed. The zombie in the front of the pack never wavers in his pursuit of the government troops, even though their impressive arsenal makes it painfully clear than many waves of zombies will be eliminated before any of them even gets a chance to eat a brain.
Zombie Tip:
Many hands make light work.
However, these same hands can be magically delicious for a zombie. There’s no reason work and snack time can’t mete out some kind of compromise though, you know?
The zombie whose colleague has eaten ten brains that day, and he none, shows no disdain for his talented friend, and is no less plucky in the continual pursuit of his first one. Zombies infer nothing from how their own success or failure compares to that of their colleagues. It’s not a race with zombies (except when they’re racing after a human). Your winning doesn’t make me a loser, and so on. There are an almost infinite number of humans, so it’s basically a nonzero sum game.
Compared to zombies, humans seem to be obsessed with their success or failure when compared to that of their peers. Humans watch one another. The smallest uptick in fortune is noted, and the smallest failure is likewise privately recorded. These changes and their impact prompt humans to envy, revenge, violence, and all manner of crimes. Where zombies could give a fuck about how they compare to the guy standing next to them, humans are obsessed with it to a point of detriment, to the point where it hampers their effectiveness and hurts their ability to get on with their lives.
But you don’t have to be.
As our exercise for week 5, you will construct a list of all persons in your life for whom you harbor any negative feelings related to their success or failure. This should not include persons you simply dislike for their character or for some other reason (bad breath, clinginess, attempted murder). We all have sworn enemies upon whom we would wish no success ever, but this is not a list for those people. This list is for people whom we resent because of their success.
Along with the person’s name, give a little descripton of who they are and their relation to you, the precise nature of the grudge, and how you currently express your feelings when you’re around this person.
When finished, it should look similar to this:
Name: Charlie Johnson
Description: College roommate
Grudge: Spent his whole college experience, including two senior years, drinking my beer and playing Quake while I took honors classes and worked two jobs. Ten years later, I’m little more than a secretary with a fancy title, and Charlie runs his father’s yarn factory in Ohio for six figures a year (and has a four-hour workday).
Current tactic: I just try to avoid Charlie altogether. Now and then he’ll come through town on “business” but I usually make up an excuse not to see him. At our last college reunion, I got drunk enough that he would think my attitude was just the booze talking. It wasn’t.
Name: Dustin Moore
Description: Friend from work
Grudge: Dustin is my age, but acts like he’s about 15. He dresses badly, has never worked out a day in his life, and is always broke. He’s inarticulate, regularly makes off-color jokes, and believed the Blair Witch Project was real for like five years or something. Despite this, women everywhere love him. Whether at the office or out at a bar, he’s got ladies all over him. It makes no sense, but there it is. In contrast, I’m responsible, smart, and keep myself in way better shape than Dustin. Despite this, I’ve been on only three dates in the past five years, and two of those were with women I met through Dustin. What the hell!?
Current tactic: Small but numerous passive-aggressive actions throughout the day. I sabotage his projects, “forget” to include him in important meetings, and have subscriptions to pornographic magazines sent to him at the office (the girls in the mail room just think it’s “cute”). I also make a point to keep new female employees away from him, but they always come over to say hi eventually. I’m thinking of circulating a VD rumor about him next quarter, but part of me knows it’s not even going to make a dent.
Name: Tad Smith
Description: My slackass older brother
Grudge: So, Tad, who never finished a thing in his life, including three different tries at college, calls me up like a year ago and says he has this idea for writing a movie screenplay where this retired cop gets a heart transplant, but what no one knows is that it was the heart of a psycho-killer the police have been looking for. So then the heart possesses him and HE goes out and starts being a psycho-killer, but the police are still following their leads for the OLD psycho-killer. When the police finally do get on his trail, he gets shot and, wait for it, he has to have ANOTHER heart transplant. But check it, they put the killer’s heart in a THIRD person, so then the hero has to help the police catch this other person before HE starts being the psycho-killer.
I told Tad to forget about it and instead concentrate on getting an associate’s degree or a job or something.
Anyhow, last month it got optioned by Twentieth-Century Fox for $100,000 plus points, and Jack Nicholson is attached. I hate my life.
Current tactic: Crying in my beer. Wincing whenever family members talk about how “successful” Tad is. Also, I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to ask him if I can visit the set and meet Nicholson. (Really like The Shining.)
You may have more (or possibly fewer) subjects on your list. It doesn’t matter. The important thing for our purposes is your ability to identify the nature of your grudge, and that you be honest about how you’re currently dealing with it (or not dealing with it, as the case may be).
Once you have your list finished, we’ll need to take a leap of faith via a thought experiment that may seem fanciful at first (but bear with me). Pretend, for a moment, that
the offenses committed by those who have wronged you, were not done unto you, but instead, to a zombie. Unlikely, yes, but give it a shot.
Next, ask yourself how a zombie would react to this situation. A zombie wouldn’t hold a grudge, but what would it do? You can be as specific or as general as you like. If your first idea about a zombie’s reaction doesn’t feel right, then give it some time and come back to it after a break. Think about everything we’ve learned about zombies up to this point. When you think you have an idea, go ahead and make a new list of how a zombie would react in each instance. For example:
Situation: My slacker roommate from college is now set for life with a sinecure he doesn’t begin to deserve. Zombie reaction: I don’t think a zombie would care. A zombie might eat him, but only if he were, you know, around.
Situation: Guy at work inexplicably gets more tail than Ron Jeremy.
Zombie reaction: Nothing. Zombies aren’t into the ladies. Or men. Or sex at all.
Situation: Undeserving brother sells a screenplay out of nowhere.
Zombie reaction: I guess nothing. Maybe visit the set to eat people.
Noticing a pattern? The goal here is not to make you feel foolish, but to drive home the way that a zombie lets everything roll off. A zombie’s inability to hold a grudge is not just an abstract idea. It can apply to the grudges in your life, too.
For the final step of this exercise, go once more over your examples and compare and contrast your way of coping with (or reacting to) these people against a zombie’s way. Take your time, and note the benefits of each. Specifically, I’d like you to note what your reaction “costs” you in terms of energy and effort (contrasted with that of a zombie), and what your reaction has the potential to accomplish (contrasted with that of a zombie).
The finished product could look something like this:
Situation: College roommate gets more than he deserves.
My response: Avoidance, public intoxication.
Zombie response: More or less nothing.
Evaluation: My response leads to pretty much nothing, except for looking like I turned out a drunk in front of my old professors. Involves lying and ingesting nine gin and tonics.
Zombie response also accomplishes nothing.
Situation: Guy at work gets all the tail.
My response: Sabotage, prankery, misdirection of female employees.
Zombie response: More or less nothing.
Evaluation: My way involves coming up with brilliant pranks, but does cost me some lost work hours. My pranks don’t work though, which just makes me hate him more. The zombie way is just doing nothing, but I guess it wouldn’t make me madder every day.
Situation: Undeserving brother gets glamorous payday.
My response: Sullenness. Secret desire to meet famous actors.
Zombie response: More or less nothing.
Evaluation: My way does nothing, except makes me feel depressed. The cost is I’m bummed. Maybe if I’m nice to him and look pitiful, I get to visit the set. The zombie way also does nothing. A zombie probably isn’t depressed, though. And, again, he could still go to the set to eat famous people if he wanted a change of pace.
What I hope these (and your) results illustrate, is that the best outcome in most of these cases is nothing. The best possible reaction is no reaction at all.
The zombie way is also cheaper. Deciding instantly that you will not resent someone costs nothing. In the other above examples, we see costs. We see over-consumption of alcohol, man-hours lost on the job, and somebody looking all sullen in front of Jack Nicholson. None of these costs “does” anything to settle the score with the person we envy. The person holding the grudge, on the other hand, stands to hurt himself in each different instance.
When you let someone make you hold a grudge, you give them power over you.
Remember:
That a zombie does not hold a grudge is directly to the zombie’s advantage.
It’s not the case that zombies are so powerful that grudges don’t concern them. Rather, they choose not to hold grudges, and this makes them powerful.
6
What’s That Rule? Play It Cool.
Wherever they are, whomever they’re with, and whatever the situation, zombies have a way of making the best of things.
No, wait, that’s actually selling it short a bit.
Zombies don’t just make the best of things. At least not in the way regular people do.
When they get knocked down, they spring right back to life.
When their situation looks bad, they don’t pause for an instant—not for one instant—to be depressed about it, before continuing on their way.
When forces that promise almost certain doom to a zombie array themselves before it, a zombie doesn’t flinch (though some higher-functioning zombies have been known to smile).
A zombie doesn’t just “make the best of it.” Rather, a zombie is like a resilience-machine, designed to stay on course no matter what. Words like ennui, hesitation, doubt, and depression aren’t even in its vocabulary.
There is every indication that, at every moment it exists, a zombie is doing what it loves, and loving what it does. The quest for brains is not something that a zombie’s going to let come second for any reason. Keenly aware that becoming flustered, or depressed, or in any way emotionally distracted does not further its purposes, a zombie simply chooses not to lose its cool.
Have you ever heard anybody talk about a zombie that had lost its cool? You’ll also never hear someone talk about a zombie “flying off the handle and trying to eat someone’s brain.” This is because zombies are already after your brain, which is as “off the handle” as it gets, really.
Have you ever heard of an angry zombie? (True, zombies can appear angry when compared to humans, but think in terms of “compared to other zombies.”)
How about a sad zombie? (A zombie standing by itself out in the rain might seem, for a second, like a pitiful sight. But trust me, that thing is feeling no pain. Zombies aren’t humans, as should be painfully clear by this point.)
A zombie doesn’t wince at what most of us would call a “desperately dire situation” and “a tragically grave misfortune.” The average human is not so lucky.
Remember:
Zombies don’t let emotions bring them down. Or up. Zombies stay in control.
It doesn’t take much to bum out your typical person. A parking ticket can do it. An unexpected visit from an in-law, likewise. A lousy horoscope reading? Sure, for some people.
The impact of our misfortunes is usually far less than we give them credit for. The lasting negative impacts of these events are usually nothing. They are temporary inconveniences, or minor pains that will be over soon. Yet humans have a way of “catastrophizing” and concentrating upon the worst possible implications of a situation or circumstance.
A bad performance review at work, and we suddenly decide we’re about to be fired, and will never get another job, and are literally just weeks from living on a friend’s couch.
A rash on our shoulder that won’t go away, and we’re convinced it’s melanoma and we can count on being dead by this time next year.
A policeman at the door to ask if we’ve seen a missing neighbor kid, and our mind goes right to the mail-fraud ring we’ve been running out of the basement, and before we know what we’re saying we’re on our knees confessing it all to the man in blue and begging him to put in a word for leniency with the judge.
In summary, we really suck at keeping our cool compared to zombies. At the first sign of a potentially adverse circumstance, we’re apt to crumble like a crumb cake.
Zombies, on the other hand, excel at playing it cool.
They are masters of making the best of a situation and keeping their composure. And you can be too, if you’re willing to make like a zombie.
The importance of this week’s lesson cannot be overemphasized. To drive home the point, for this week’s zombification exercises you’re going to make
a Greatest Hits of Losing My Cool list.
The Zen of Zombie Page 12