22/01/2026
The Zombification of Children
As I was driving this morning, doing my usual errands, I noticed it again. I notice it every day, but today it hit harder. The children. Not talking. Not laughing. Not even looking up. Heads down. Faces blank. Souls switched off. Completely glued to their phones. Two of them walked straight across the pavement without even knowing where they were going. No awareness. No presence. EarPods jammed in, brains being microwaved, eyes locked onto a screen like obedient little drones being led by an invisible leash.
And before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, yes, I know. We enable it. We’re the parents. We hand them the screens. We buy the phones. We pay for the data. And we wrap it all up in excuses like “I don’t want them to feel left out” or “that’s just how it is now.” But that excuse has quietly turned into a surrender. We didn’t just adapt to the system. We bent the knee to it.
But what’s even darker is what’s coming next. Because now it isn’t just teenagers and pre-teens. It’s babies. Toddlers. Two-year-olds. Three-year-olds. Five and six year olds being handed tablets because it’s easier than engaging with them. You see it everywhere. Parents out for dinner, sat at a table, and the child isn’t part of the moment at all. iPad in front of their face so the adults can eat in peace. Children pushed around supermarkets in trolleys with screens inches from their eyes because that’s the only way they’ll stay quiet. That’s the only way they’ll “behave.”
So imagine what these children are going to be like when they’re older. They won’t even understand what it is not to have one. There’s no memory of boredom. No memory of waiting. No memory of sitting still and observing the world. Their nervous systems are being wired from birth to require constant stimulation just to feel normal.
When I was young, and I’m not even ancient, there was none of this. I didn’t live indoors. I didn’t sit staring at a glowing rectangle. I didn’t have a phone until I was sixteen or seventeen, and even then it was a brick that could barely send a text. And the only reason you texted was to see if your mates were coming out. Not to doom scroll. Not to watch strangers dance. Not to absorb algorithms designed to hollow you out.
We were outside. All the time. Sun on our skin. Cuts on our knees. Building dens. Climbing trees. Swimming in lakes we probably shouldn’t have been swimming in. Getting lost. Getting bored. Getting into trouble. Learning limits. Learning courage. Learning how to exist in the real world without constant stimulation spoon-fed into our skulls.
Now look at them. Adventure has been replaced by pixels. Exploration replaced by avatars. Risk replaced by safety warnings. Curiosity replaced by consumption. Kids don’t wander anymore. They don’t invent games. They don’t sit with boredom long enough for imagination to kick in. Everything is pre-packaged. Pre-approved. Pre-digested.
This generation is being raised indoors, plugged in, monitored, dopamine-dripped and emotionally flatlined. And the scary part isn’t just that this one is bad. It’s that the next one will be worse. Even more disconnected. Even more anxious. Even more incapable of existing without a device telling them who they are, what to think, and what to feel.
Children haven’t evolved. They’ve been domesticated. Tamed. Pacified. Zombified.
And we’re watching it happen in real time.
