The Walking Dead Go Global: How Burnout Became the Planet’s Shared Currency
The Walking Dead: A Global Tour of the Half-Alive
By Our Man in the Departures Lounge
If you thought “the walking dead” was just cable television’s longest-running excuse for splatter makeup, you haven’t cleared immigration lately. From Wall Street to the winding visa queues of Dubai, the planet is awash with ambulatory corpses who nevertheless manage to hold down jobs, collect airline miles, and—crucially—vote. They are not the flesh-eating variety (save for the occasional hedge-fund bonus round) but something far more durable: citizens who have biologically survived yet spiritually clocked out, trudging through late capitalism like extras in a George Romero film who read too many HR manuals.
The taxonomy is now universal. In Tokyo, they’re the sōshoku-danshi—herbivore men who ghost through Shibuya in immaculate suits, too exhausted by precarity to bother dating. Lagos traffic jams are staffed by hawkers who sell phone chargers to drivers already dead on the inside from a four-hour commute. Meanwhile, in Brussels, entire committees of the European Commission shuffle between climate summits emitting only press releases and carbon. The virus, it seems, has gone airborne—spread not by bites but by 4G and compulsory optimism.
Consider the numbers. The WHO reports a 25 % rise in “burnout syndrome” since 2019, conveniently sidestepping the awkward detail that the syndrome now begins somewhere around the second unpaid internship. Gallup’s 2023 “State of the Global Workplace” poll found 59 % of employees “quiet quitting,” which is corporate argot for “present in body, absent in soul, still billing by the hour.” If these figures were a new variant of influenza, nations would be closing borders and burning effigies of middle management. Instead, governments classify them as “productivity headwinds” and order another round of mindfulness webinars.
The geopolitical implications are deliciously grim. China’s “lying-flat” youth threaten the sacred 5 % growth target, so the Party responds with moral pep talks on “positive energy” delivered by officials who themselves haven’t felt an honest emotion since the Beijing Olympics. Across the Atlantic, U.S. senators tweet about “quiet-quitting culture” while staffers draft their tweets—quietly, of course, from rented wombs of motivation. In the Global South, remittance economies keep the shambling classes on life support: a Filipino nurse in Riyadh, technically alive, FaceTimes her toddlers at 3 a.m. before disinfecting another sheikh’s panic room. She earns enough to keep three generations breathing; nobody asks if she still is.
Technology, ever helpful, offers palliatives that double as accelerants. AI-driven HR bots now monitor keystrokes for signs of existential drift, ensuring the undead remain just productive enough to avoid severance. South Korean convenience stores pilot “grief recognition” software that detects when a cashier’s smile flat-lines, automatically dispensing coupons for discounted soju. In Sweden, employers experiment with six-hour workdays, discovering that staff still manage to stare blankly at screens for eight—the extra two hours now simply unpaid.
Climate change adds a surreal backdrop. As Canadian wildfire smoke drifted over New York this summer, brokers in N95s continued their morning chant of “buy the dip,” proving that even apocalyptic orange skies can be monetized. Meanwhile, insurance adjusters in Pakistan wade through floodwater, smartphone in one hand, actuarial tables in the other, calculating premiums for next year’s climate refugees with the same enthusiasm they once reserved for minor fender benders. Somewhere, a reinsurance underwriter in Zurich sighs, then books another sustainability retreat in the Maldives—carbon offsets included, soul sold separately.
What, then, is the forecast? The walking dead are not a subculture; they are the new majority, the collateral damage of progress that promised leisure but delivered LinkedIn. Revolutions have been sparked by less, yet today’s undead are too tired to revolt. Instead, they doom-scroll, vote for populists offering the illusion of change, and wait for the next algorithm to save them. History may record this era as the Great Lethargy—a planetary siesta from which humanity never quite awoke. Until then, the boarding call blares, the passport gets stamped, and the queue shuffles forward. One foot in front of the other; no biting required.
