One of the primal fears of the self is that it is not in control of the situation at hand. This is quite obvious when you see this for what it is: self does everything it can to survive, including interestingly enough, deceive itself and those around it, and whatever it cannot control could risk harming it, or even killing it.
This is why people who spend a lot of time in man-made environments, particularly engaged with screens, tend to be afraid of nature and animals, particularly wild animals, because those do not obey our selfish desires. To be clear, everyone should be careful around wild animals, particularly the very big ones such as bears, wolves, moose and the likes, and I don't consider it strange to be afraid of them, because the body naturally fears for its own life, but egoic fear is quite different from our natural instincts of self-preservation. Egoic fear makes people afraid of small insects, of fish swimming in the river, and of small mice skittering around, but not of domesticated animals such as cats and dogs, because it is understood that they obey human commands.
It's also interesting to note that to the extent that someone is afraid of smaller insects, their fears tend to not manifest when they are embedded in natural environments. A spider in an apartment can look scary, but the same spider in a grassy field looks far less threatening, probably because the sheer space of open environments makes them look far smaller in comparison, and because there is just a lot more movement when you're out in the open; there is an implicit sense that the spider and you are part of a bigger whole, that they are not merely interested in freaking you or harming you, and that they are simply going about their life and happen to be near you at this present moment.
This is one of the many benefits of spending more time in nature: the implicit understanding that Reality does not obey our (selfish) commands, that all of us are part of a bigger flow of life that is beyond our wills and minds, which then allows us to participate in it in a healthier manner, rather than repeatedly bash our heads against a wall, hoping to get the one singular outcome that we need to feel safe.
Because ultimately, the self's desire to control every situation it is a part of is a losing game. For one, we are all going to die, whether we like it or not. While there are many people who pretend to relinquish control out of virtue, when they are merely incompetent or afraid of taking responsibility, there is genuine wisdom in being able to let go and accept whatever unfolds, because the cycles of life and death are beyond the agency of any individual and any group.
Secondly, even the mundane day-to-day interactions that we are a part of, and have a lot of control over, often do not go according to what we want, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When the self gets everything it wants, it finds satisfaction and comfort in the short term, but over time those become stifling, like seeing your love for life suffocate under a soft pillow. Love, freedom, passion, and all of the good experiences in life really, are not discrete things that we can identify and aim for, and control in order to reliably get, they are qualities which we experience by being one with the moment. Oftentimes the self recoils in front of those, because they are not to its liking; for instance self tends to dislike love because it requires surrender, or it dislikes genuine freedom because it requires responsibility, which is how self ends up creating a prison from its comfort zone, preferring what is familiar, what is non-threatening, over what is genuinely good.
So not everything goes according to our plans, and perhaps that is the greatest thing about life, because happiness and love cannot ever be planned for, because the mind cannot grasp quality, all it can do is convert the mystery of life into non-mysterious concepts and quantities, which it can then dissect, tinker with, and control, but never experience. The tragedy of the (unconsciously used) mind is that it can get anything it thinks it wants, but it doesn't even know what it wants, because genuine, conscious desires, are deeper than the self.
Love and happiness are often the first thing that the self runs away from, as mentioned above, because fundamentally they cannot be controlled, which is why nowadays we live in a world of predictable stimuli, the hollowed out version of conscious quality. Video games are probably the most obvious example of such a shift, though really, anything involving screens does something similar, in that it replaces a qualitative Reality outside of the control of the self, and replaces it by a simulated pseudo-reality that the self can fully grasp (through the rational mind) and control.
This is why people who spend a lot of time in front of a screen tend to be so impatient, because they're used to interacting with a system that does everything on command. The idea that there are realities which are beyond their control, and beyond the control of anyone, instead being part of larger cycles such as the cycle of the seasons, is not just difficult to accept, but for some, something that needs to be fixed through the use of the rational mind, which leads to worldviews such as transhumanism, which are really a secular form of the literal religions that promise salvation to human beings through some type of literal intermediary—religious dogma in the past, the rational mind and technology now.
The world of causal and predictable stimuli leads to a world of zombies, but unlike what the popular myths surrounding them tell us, the living dead are actually quite clever 1, docile, obedient, and pacifist; they do not fight, and they do not eat brains, instead they eat slop and let the technological system do the fighting for them. 2
The inner life, or rather unlife, of the living dead is empty for quality, which is why they are animated by utilitarian concerns: getting money, navigating bureaucracy, maintaining their possessions as the global economy is showing clear cracks, and of course, maintaining control over their life and their surroundings, or at least, feeling in control.
This is why we live in a world of hollow, but rational momentum, because when self puts its survival above everything else, it becomes utterly mechanical and thus predictable. Of course people would double down on their hedonistic life as the system is collapsing. Of course people would deny that there are fundamental reasons that humans cannot address for such a collapse. Of course people would turn back to (literal) religions, in their fear of death and their loss of landmarks. And of course, the root causes of such a collapse, namely the unsustainability and insanity of the technological system, and the inability for the self-informed self to surrender to Reality and respond aptly to the situation, are never even mentioned.
The world of zombies is less like The Walking Dead, and more like the current landscape of politics: clever but incredibly narrow arguments about secondary or tertiary problems, so that everyone can conveniently ignore our collective internal death, and so that a small minority may seize power and provide reassurance to the ones who vote for it.
The inevitable fate of a self who is terrified of not being in control is, unironically, death. Not only the death of the self, because nothing can stop the grim reaper, but also the death of the conscious I that 'precedes' it, except that the self, by itself, doesn't notice such a disappearance, because it requires a degree of consciousness to notice its disappearance.
As a result, the last decades of the modern world will be spent in overwhelming misery and excruciating anxiety about the worsening state of the world, but very few will notice the elephant in the room: the fact that hardly anyone feels love in their heart, sees beauty with their eyes, and feels passion in their belly anymore. The zombie apocalypse is already here, and its name is 'safety'.
1 Not intelligent though, see also intelligence versus cleverness
2 See also The Nightmare of Postmodernism by Darren Allen, and his piece on the technological system
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2026-08-02