The Age of the Psychic Coma
Fire in an Opera House, Lawrence W. Ladd
Most of us have stopped living. We aren’t dead, but we aren’t really living either, not in a way that feels aligned, purposeful, or even awake. Whether it’s fear, comfort, or some mix of both, too many people are drifting. Ask most adults and they’ll admit they aren’t living up to their potential, their dreams, or even their values. They’re coasting, half-asleep at the wheel, going through the motions that look like living but don’t feel like living a life worth living. I’ve typed the word living so many times it’s started to lose meaning, which, in some strange way, is exactly the point. Are we actually evolving, or are we becoming easier to control?
We’ve abandoned real life in favor of living vicariously, through screens, through other people’s stories, through the curated highlight reels we now confuse with connection. We’ve traded real relationship for something more like familiar performance. We numb the discomfort of being by constantly distracting ourselves from it. And we don’t even notice it anymore. The moment existence starts to whisper, when silence gets too close, when we’re left with nothing but ourselves, we panic. We reach for something to mute it, or crank the volume on something else, even if it borders on absurdity. Sometimes it’s noise. Sometimes it’s urgency. Sometimes it’s someone else’s crisis. Anything but the quiet truth of our own aliveness.
But what exactly is this state we’re in? Is it the next step in some natural evolution into a transhuman future? Or are we being lulled into a kind of distracted coma, so far from our own souls we’ve forgotten how to get back? Is it AI, or just the usual suspects, the wealthy elites, the shadowy puppet-masters, the demon-adjacent reptilian overlords we love to fear? We’ve heard all the theories, watched the docs, listened to the podcasts, but most of us stop at the surface. We don’t want to dig. We don’t want to sit still long enough to wonder what’s really happening beneath the noise. We’d rather scroll than ask real questions.
Social media has turned humans into compliant spectators. We don’t live for ourselves, we live to perform for likes or the hopes of going viral, we watch other people perform life, and then we measure our worth against their curated presentation. It doesn’t even feel real, it’s a simulation. When Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” I don’t think he imagined just how literal that would become. We’re not just playing roles, we’re trapped in them, compulsively performing, forgetting that real life isn’t supposed to be a show. Some days it feels like The Truman Show, but we built the set ourselves and forgot the cameras were rolling. And the irony again is that the only person truly living was Truman. The line between authentic existence and simulated life has blurred so completely that we’ve forgotten there ever was a line. And maybe the most unsettling part is that we volunteered for this. We handed over our attention, autonomy, agency, and aliveness, not because we were forced to, but because it was more comfortable and convenient than doing the hard work.
Carl Jung warned us, like the psycho-spiritual mystic seeker he was, that “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” He was talking about this very thing. Maybe not social media, but whatever mechanism we use to keep ourselves just distracted enough with enough meaningless diversions to avoid acknowledging our shadow, let alone facing it or integrating it. Let me be clear - I’m not saying all distractions and diversions are bad, but when we become addicted to them, when they take over and the line between fantasy and reality become blurred and we do just about anything to avoid facing reality, that’s the problem. And it opens us up to what I can only describe as prime for a hostile takeover, and you may be so hypnotized that you don’t realize it’s even happening. This isn’t just a cultural shift, it’s a spiritual one. We are drifting away from our inner world, little by little, until the outer world becomes the only reflection we recognize. And what does that world offer us in return? The comfort of sameness. The illusion of certainty. A thousand ways to quiet the ache of being awake. And to quote another one of my favorite thinkers, Alan Watts, who said, “We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.” In that gap, we forget how to be. And so we keep running, not toward evolution, but away from presence.
It’s tempting to blame artificial intelligence or modern technology as the final tipping point, but the truth is, every major innovation throughout history has reshaped how we live. The invention of the printing press, the engine, electricity, none of these were inherently destructive. They changed us, yes, but they also gave us new ways to create, to connect, to imagine. Even before the digital age, there were very few professional foragers. Blacksmithing, once a sacred craft essential to survival, became a historical footnote. Culture evolves. Skills shift. And sometimes, things are lost in the process.
So maybe AI is not the downfall of humanity. Maybe it is just the next wave. The real danger is not the tool itself, but how we relate to it. Whether we use it with reverence and responsibility, or whether we let it use us. What matters is balance. Awareness and intention are also important factors in our relationship with emerging technologies that may threaten our ability to think and act for ourselves. The willingness to stop the slide into fragmentation long enough to ask ourselves if we are still awake. And maybe most importantly, to take back our lives from the edge of the abyss, to consciously cultivate a life we don’t feel the need to escape from all the time. A life rich in presence. One where we are not glued to a screen, scrolling endlessly for the next drop of dopamine, but rooted in something real. You might even say, a life worth living.
Vol de Zombis, 1946 by Hyppolite, Hector
Maybe that’s why the myth of the zombie keeps resurfacing. Not just in Hollywood, which now may feel so last decade, and I’ll be honest, I can’t say or type the word zombie without hearing Will Ferrell beg “don’t eat me zombie” in Stepbrothers without giggling to myself. But back to my point, in the way we now describe people: zombified, checked out, numb. In modern pop culture, zombies are usually mindless, flesh-eating corpses driven only by base instincts. But the roots of the myth go much deeper, and darker. In Haitian Vodou, the zombie wasn’t just a monster, it was a warning. According to spoken traditions, zombies were enslaved souls, reanimated by dark magic to live in a state of perpetual submission. They were not truly dead like you see in entertainment designed for jump scares, but they had no will of their own. In many ways, the myth functioned as both a fear and a metaphor, a fate worse than death for the enslaved: to lose one’s soul, one’s autonomy, and still be forced to work. To live without agency. To be owned, body and spirit. It wasn’t just about fear of death. It was about the terror of being controlled, of being turned into something that appears alive but has no voice, no choice, no freedom. Sound familiar?
What if the zombie myth wasn’t just folklore, but a warning that we failed to heed? What if we’re living it now, voluntarily, without even realizing it? This is why I love mythology and think it still matters. The old stories, myths, and folktales aren’t just old, they’re alive. They’re caution signs written in symbols. They outlast civilizations because they speak to the parts of us that haven’t changed. They show us who we are when we’re paying attention, and who we become when we’re not. And right now, the story we’re living doesn’t feel like a hero’s journey. It feels like a trance. A collective, complicit forgetting.
Because when we stop questioning, stop feeling, stop thinking for ourselves, we don’t become free, we become easy to manipulate, making us easily programmable. Maybe we aren’t bound in chains, but if our attention, our identity, and our energy are being shaped by systems that benefit from our disconnection, how free are we really? We watch people pretend to live on a myriad of apps and devices while we forget how to live ourselves. And when we are out living, it all too often becomes performative for internet validation from strangers. We scroll through polished joy, rehearsed emotion, filtered truth. We consume so much that we forget we are also being shaped by what we take in.
I’ll never forget watching an episode of After Skool featuring Graham Hancock. Maybe you’ve seen the episode or still from YouTube. At one point, Graham asked, “What is wrong with the world?” and a Native elder replied, “Because you have severed your connection to spirit.” It hit me like a brick to the face, but you know…the good kind. The kind that wakes you up. It forced me to take an honest look at my own complacency, the quiet ways I’d forfeited autonomy in exchange for convenience, and the blind spots I didn’t even know I was protecting. That line stayed with me. When that connection to spirit is cut, when we lose the thread that links us to meaning, presence, and responsibility, we don’t become free, we become manageable. And we rarely notice the difference.
Odysseus and the Sirens” by Oskar Greiner
In The Odyssey, Odysseus knew the Sirens’ call would be irresistible. Their voices promised truth, beauty, knowledge, but anyone who followed them would be lost forever. So he had his crew plug their ears with wax, and he tied himself to the mast, commanding them not to untie him no matter how much he begged. That’s how seriously they took temptation. That’s how dangerous it was to be seduced by a beautiful lie. What if social media, constant stimulation, herd morality, and performative outrage are the new Sirens? What if the endless scroll, the curated dopamine drip, the digital echo chamber of likes and panic and conformity, is the melody that lures us from ourselves, not with violence, but with comfort? We don’t hear screeching, we hear the siren song of validation and belonging from strangers online and we begin to need more of it, like a drug, because we aren’t designed for this level of constancy that technology offers. We hear the illusion of being seen, while our deeper selves quietly go overboard. Odysseus didn’t try to fight the Sirens with brute force or denial. He used wisdom. He created structure. He anticipated the pull and planned for it. Maybe we need our own version of that—something that anchors us to what’s real when the song starts to call. Not because we’re weak, but because we’re human. And we know what happens when we pretend we’re immune.
Perhaps how we reclaim ourselves by remembering that we are part of the real world, and that living is a sacred act in itself. By refusing to let our minds be hijacked by noise and chaos in the digital ether. By bringing ourselves back into our own bodies, minds, and spirits when we notice we’ve started to drift. We don’t have to tie ourselves to the mast of a ship to resist the siren song of comfort and convenience over real connection. But we do have to know it’s calling. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we can enjoy modern conveniences and celebrate the beautiful things technology offers us. But we decide if we let it control us, or if we control our use of it. This isn’t about fear of the future. It’s about staying human in a world that keeps trying to make us forget how. This isn’t about going backward. It’s about stepping out of the trance. Evolution doesn’t have to mean disconnection. But it will, if we forget what being human feels like. And being human is messy, but it is achingly beautiful and much shorter than we want to admit. So no, this isn’t about fear of the future. It’s about refusing to forget the soul. Because if we lose that, if we willingly give it away, what exactly is it that survives?
In the old stories, zombies don’t resist. They don’t rebel, because they can’t. In the Vodou tradition, they have no control over themselves. Their minds are trapped, unable to cry for help or break free from the magic that keeps them under. But what about us? Are we quietly screaming inside, or are we in an even worse state, one where we don’t even realize we’re not free? But not everyone stays asleep. In the old myths, even the most cursed figures could be reclaimed. Souls lost in the dark could remember their names. The spell could be broken, but only through presence, through will, through choice. Even the zombie, in some versions of the Vodou tradition, could be revived with salt placed on the tongue, an awakening of taste, of sensation, of self. The return of soul to body.
Maybe that’s where we begin. Not with outrage or with big showy spectacles, but with remembering. Tasting the salt, so to speak, that snaps us back to reality. Remembering how to be here, embracing our life, even the messy bits. We need more stillness and quiet in our lives and minds. We need to remember it’s ok to be bored, that we don’t need to constantly feed the hungry ghost. We need to find our own stillness, away from the noise, so we can remember how to hear our own souls and to think for ourselves before we borrow someone else’s thoughts because it’s easy, trendy and convenient by digital metrics that, let me be frank, benefit from keeping everyone in a heightened and frightened state of anxiety so we aren’t rooted, calm and deeply grounded in the real world.
This isn’t about fear of the future, it’s about staying human in a world that keeps trying to make us forget how. Because if we lose that, if we willingly give it away, what exactly is it that survives?
