How to Become a Zombie

A step-by-step guide with helpful tips

So, you want to become a zombie? Great! The first step is, of course, to die. Unfortunately, dying isn’t as simple as it seems. You have to understand zombie death to die like a zombie.

You can’t die all the way and still live as a zombie. You can’t become anything, much less a zombie, if you die completely. You have to partially die to become a zombie. Death walkers are dead enough to represent death and alive enough to walk.

In a way, zombies are “half-dead.” This makes some intuitive sense. Half-dead. The dead half of death walkers is what makes them dead, the living half is what makes them walk.

Half-dead. Half of what, though? One half is dead, the other is living. Put the halves together, and what do you get?

Maybe the sum is the zombie’s life. Half of the zombie’s life is alive, the other half of the zombie’s life is dead. Hmm. Maybe the sum is the zombie’s body. Half of the zombie’s body is alive, the other half of the zombie’s body is dead.

These possibilities create strange paradoxes. What does it mean for “life” to be “alive”? What does it mean to be “half alive”? Can life ever not be alive? How can “life” be death and still be alive? And how can a body be dead?

The zombie defies us. It haunts us. It walks across our screens. It lurks in the dark corners of our world. The zombie resonates with us. We sense it is our enemy, but it is not as easy to hate as the other monsters. Zombies are eerie, they disturb us. We see them bear the faces of our loved ones. We want to save them from the curse of death. To our horror, we empathize with the horde.

In a zombie world, we question whether the painful struggle to survive is worth it. We consider escaping the struggle by embracing the death that zombifies. We search for purpose in the hellscape, a meaning to run toward. We want to live for something — anything real — so that our lives aren’t spent just playing this game where we constantly run from zombies and the contagious death that animates them.

It is true that the zombie is half-dead in existential and bodily senses, but there is a truer way to see the zombie. A creature doesn’t need to be half-alive in any physical sense to be a zombie. Zombies still grope around for flesh when their torsos are chopped in half. Some zombies need flesh to survive. These zombies can be on the brink of death when starved of flesh — they can physically die in their zombified state.

The key aspect of the zombie, the essential quality that makes a creature a zombie, relates to the soul. The zombie’s soul is half-dead, so the zombie will always be half-dead, regardless of the physical form it takes. No matter how many limbs a creature has, how old it is, or how starved it is for flesh, it will always be half-alive if its soul is half-dead.

There is a deeper dimension to this. In order for a soul to be half-dead and half-alive, it must be divided in two. There must be a crack in a creature’s soul for it to be a true zombie. The true source of the creature’s suffering, of its condition, is this break in its soul. The fragmentation of being creates pain that feels like death.

So, let’s recap! You still want to become a zombie, right?

Step 1: Fragment your being. This may sound harder than it actually is. You’ve done this many times before. It’s an unavoidable aspect of living. Here are three helpful tips to fragment your being so that you can intentionally become a zombie.

Tip 1: Lie as much as possible to as many people as possible, but work to maintain the lies you tell. Lying is the best way to self-divide. When you maintain a lie, you become two different people depending on the time, a liar and a truth-seer. There are times when you see the truth. The truth bears down upon you, often when you are alone in the dark of night.

Other times, usually with people during the daytime, you ignore the truth. You bolster the bigger lies with smaller ones. You enact lies by acting ignorant of the truth. You live as someone who does not know what you do. You embody the liar, become the liar in your bodily responses and facial expressions. You blind yourself when you inhabit the liar. Part of you knows that you could easily see the truth — all you would have to do is truly look.

Over time, the lies will become more reflexive, more embodied and intuitive. You will automatically shift between liar and truth-seer without having to consciously think about your shape-shifting. The less attention you pay to your soul, the more the division within your soul festers and the deeper it goes. When you see the truth, you see the division in yourself. Avoid falling into the truth-seeing side of your soul, avoid self-reflection. Be the liar more often so that your division can metastasize faster.

Tip 2: Avoid love. It’s easier to fragment your being when the love of the people in your life isn’t healing your soul’s necrosis. True love heals and grows people’s souls. Love is the healing potion for zombies, it’s death’s poison.

To illustrate why you need to avoid love to fragment your being, imagine that you and a stranger are staring down at your joint reflection in a river. At first, the water is choppy. Currents ripple and distort the image. You can’t see yourself or the stranger clearly. Slowly, as the water stills, the reflection clarifies. You see the stranger, but you also see yourself. In the water of love, you see your soul.

Which sucks! Ugh! There’s nothing worse than seeing your soul when you’re trying to fragment it! Your eyes have adjusted to only seeing truth in the nighttime. They have darkened. When you see your soul, its light hurts your eyes and makes them bleed. Souls always shine like stars when their true natures are exposed. (I saw a bumper sticker on an 18-wheeler yesterday that reminded me of love. It said, “If you can’t see my mirror, then I can’t see you!”)

You need to stay in the dark. You need to avoid seeing your soul and souls in general. You have to avoid the love that brings souls to light. You have to disconnect from the people who love you to prevent their love from exposing your soul to yourself. Darken your eyes, prevent them from bleeding in the light. Cover your eyes, protect them from the exposure.

Avoid love by isolating your soul from real connection. You can still be around people, but only people who aren’t interested in truly connecting with you on a soul-to-soul level. Surround yourself with superficial people. Never show your true self to them, never reveal the pain of your inner division. You are cursed, they are cursed. Do nothing together to distract yourselves from the curse, from death. Make sure you do not bleed out your true feelings and remind anyone in the crowd about souls! You will be banished from the horde for halting the putrefying necrosis.

Tip 3: Blind yourself to numb your soul. Tragically, it hurts to fragment your being. If disintegrating didn’t hurt, no one would seek integrity. The pain of division is not like the pain of a stubbed toe or a smashed face. It feels like the whole world is painful. It hurts just to exist. It more or less always hurts to live in a decaying world, so the hurt is hard to pin down. The atmosphere is pain.

Many people accidentally become zombies by entering into a world of pain and then forgetting where they are. They do not remember that there is a possible world without soul pain. Such people often flail around and localize their pain in various specific sources over time. They conflate soul pain with normal pain. They assume that the global pain they feel isn’t emanating from their soul, but coming from a specific source in the world. They “find” the “reason” for their pain in specifics like allergic reactions, chemical imbalances, environmental toxins, secret cabals, low bank account numbers, dangerous vaccinations, social oppressions, pharmaceutical side-effects, and so on.

Really, any specific thing can have a nocebo effect. It’s possible to conflate soul pain with anything specific in life. You can blindly assume that your soul isn’t suffering from division and conclude that you are just reacting as any healthy person would to something negative.

If you want to intentionally become a zombie, you must first grasp that the real problem is the brokenness within. This is the solution for becoming a zombie. See that brokenness grows fastest when it is ignored. Make a plan. Intentionally transport yourself into a world of painful fragmentation. Lie and cover it up, ignore the guilt and the second thoughts. Ignore the pain of lying and plan ways to make yourself forget it until your forgetting becomes routine. Addict yourself to forgetfulness of the soul. Blind yourself to the state of your world in order to numb your deteriorating soul and avoid the pain. It hurts to hold yourself together when the lies pull you apart. Numb yourself to this reality.

You can do this by throwing yourself into anything that effectively distracts your attention from everything soul-related. You can up the intensity of your attention and focus on something distracting. Take a stimulant, put on some loud music, and run until you are too exhausted to think about your soul. Inversely, you can lower the intensity of your attention such that it is consumed by whatever is immediately in front of it. Take a downer, turn off the lights, and watch a show that captivates every part of you but your soul.

These are just three of the most helpful tips I have for the first step of intentionally becoming a zombie, fragment your being. To find more fragmentation strategies, look for people who always seem happy. Look for those who never cry. Look for those who appear happiest when their world is crumbling around them. Look for those whose eyes never bleed from the light. Watch how they distract themselves from their soul. Learn their ways.

Step 2: Live dead.