Warm Bodies Passivity

We living folks spend so much time trying to turn our brains off—drowning them in alcohol, drugs, or repetitive smart phone games. R's life is like this all the time, and it doesn't seem that appealing anymore.

Now that R lives a relatively safe, calm, and—most importantly—boring existence, he is longing for some excitement. Passivity isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It seems here that R is saying the people who are like "whatever" and resign themselves to the laissez-faire way of death are the ones who decay first. On the flip side, the people who hang on tenaciously to the exciting parts of life don't crumble as fast as the others. So maybe that explains why he's still so good looking.

This probably sounds really appealing to a lot of people. Thinking is pretty hard, after all. However, as we learned from the previous quote, the people who don't think new things in life are the ones who crumble the fasted. Learning keeps us thriving.

Julie's word choice of "rotting" is key here. It's almost like Perry became a zombie before he died. We have a feeling that if he did become a zombie, he would be one of the extra crumbly ones. Instant Boney.

It seems that the Living don't know how to do anything without guidance, so they're just going along with the flow. Does no one know how to think for themselves?

That's the thing about easy: it's relaxing at first, but then it becomes boring. Warm Bodies shows us that too much "easy" can actually be deadly. That's why our vacations are never permanent.

Nora's description of the stadium shows us that no one is actively trying to maintain a community. They're passively retreating into their own little worlds. Sounds a lot like R's airport community of zombies, just with more attached body parts.

R has to make himself care. Do you think caring requires effort? Is passivity a default setting that we have to fight against?

This is the attitude that's destroying the planet and, in Warm Bodies, destroying humanity itself. These are the people who think there's nothing we can do to stop global warming/social injustice/economic inequality/take your pick, so we just keep trundling toward the apocalypse, slowly and surely. Like a steamroller.