While some might trash this take for sounding "boomer" you're not wrong, on a very deep level the profound decline in American and European reading comprehension has led to nearly a quarter of our population being functionally illiterate, and the problem here is much deeper than reading scores or being well-read, the problem is without a robust, developed language system, your brain is far less capable of organizing and contextualizing even basic kinds of abstractions about our world.

We use words in our minds to create dialogues and monologs to explore meaning and synthesize ideas and understanding about complicated topics. Without words to create these narrations it's much harder or impossible understand anything beyond what you immediately feel and see and hear, you become highly linear in your thinking and also highly reactionary.

You're seeing people walking around like blank-eyed zombies because the number of blank-eyed zombies is literally increasing.