Severance consumed me during its whole second season. I was a latecomer who started Season 1 as Season 2 was starting. Getting through the first season was a struggle. It felt extremely slow and anticlimactic—until the last two episodes. I haven’t stopped thinking about this show since. One of the first existential questions I asked myself after re-watching Season 1, following the first few episodes of Season 2, was, “Am I severed?” The second question was, “Aren’t we all severed?” The unexpected joy of this series is the unending layers of meaning, creativity, symbolism, and nuance. On the surface level, I see Severance as an allegory for modern human existence. On a spiritual level, Severance is an illustration of the conflict between flesh and spirit. On a psychological level, the act of severing is dissociation and perhaps schizophrenia. Creatively, Severance is a mindbending, sci-fi masterpiece. What is Severance?Severance is an AppleTV show that wrapped its second season in March 2025. It’s set in a world that has not yet been fully shown. The premise is a corporation, Lumon, has created a chip that can divide a person’s consciousness into two, possibly more, silos, once implanted in the brain. The distinctly different consciousnesses are separated by a mental barrier. The main, dominate consciousness is the “outie.” The new consciousness is the “innie.”
The act of severing allows the chip to be activated and deactivated in limited circumstances. The circumstance of the show is the work place. More specifically, one floor of the Lumon compound called The Severed Floor. Innie’s are sought as workers on the Severed Floor, where their work is so secret that the topic and impact of their tasks are never divulged to them. Innies/workers don’t know anything about their life before they were severed into existence. For all intents and purposes, they’re newborns with a new life, and clean slate. Some believe they are separate entities. Outies/Severed know nothing of their Innie’s experiences, and generally want it that way. Those who have chosen to be severed are explicitly and radically seeking to avoid certain experiences. They don’t want to suffer, be uncomfortable, or have memories of their pain. Essentially, Outies don’t want to deal with daily life. Neither the Innie nor Outie has full recall of anything the other experiences or does during their time controlling their body. They are severed from those emotions and memories. Severance is marketed as a way for people to do menial, repetitive or painful tasks without the full investment of their full selves or their memory. People are offered the opportunity to live without their grief, loss, repeated failures, a general sense of inadequacy, and knowledge of their unfulfilling lives. During the first season, Lumon explored marketing the Severance service for recreation, health care, and other one-off experiences. During the second season, characters dive fully into a revolt against the nature of severance. Severing in real lifeOn a very basic level, Severance reminds me of social media. The early days of social media were all about putting family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances into silos. Each group had varying levels of access to our online personas. After twenty years of this, we, as a society, have harmed ourselves. We’ve damaged relationships by losing understanding of foundational building blocks for human interaction. Human relationships are now treated as if they can be partitioned. Work life is work life. Home life is home life. Social life is social life. Everyone has different personalities for each life and go out of their way to keep them separate. The ground floor of Severance is this. Before social media, partitions weren’t advertised. People didn’t take offense at being a contextual friend (school, work, church, etc.) With social media, people see connections and usually want to put themselves in the more important or honored spaces. Am I severed?The last two decades of my life have been a series of separations and re-creations. After resolving to eliminate harmful relationships from my life, I severed myself from the relationships that were actively and continuously harming me – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. These repeated acts of severance have isolated me from unnecessary attacks, petty jealousies, and negative impacts from ill intentions – from the people I least expected these things from. A good portion of this relationship cull was due to dismissive treatment, poor communication and social media behavior. It’s easy to ignore strangers online. The trouble comes when we treat friends and family like strangers in real life. Online, there are casual observers who behave like friends and friends who behave like casual observers. All with the same access to your personal shares online. Lines get blurred. Boundaries are crossed. Understandings are thrown out the window. Back in the day, casual acquaintances didn’t receive vlogs of your family drama or the fallout with your childhood bestie. It was easier to repair relationships when everyone you ever met didn’t have a way to chime in with their opinions and hot takes. Over the last two decades, the more this happened, the more people pushed back. To a point where the overall culture handles relationships in a very callous and dismissive way. Folks are loose with their own information and by extension, they become loose with those they are in relationship with. Many of us have become observers of private, demeaning, hurtful, and harmful things being uploaded for engagement and entertainment. We’ve also witnessed how the impact and consequences rarely register with the ones handling their relationships haphazardly. Society has devolved in an unnatural way. We once had a general care for our fellow humans, due to the interconnectedness of our relationships. We understood the actual human network. Like, that co-worker you’re on the fence about, may be the godson of your pastor or the daughter of your best friends mom’s hairstylist. We were gentle with people because our reputation was tied up in our treatment of them. With the internet, reputation is rarely a concern. We don’t know the people on the other side of the screen. More often than not, we don’t want to know them. There’s a general lack of care when people approach others online with foolishness. That lack of care is matched when they are then blocked, muted or reported to the platform. Eventually, that general lack of care spills over into real life. Our physical world. When we have relationships with people who know us offline, and we don’t respond to their comments, statements, or acknowledge their feelings, or the things they share, damage to the relationship is the consequence and they may stop sharing and reaching out. Before long, we’ve become a society of relationships where parties don’t value one another, and have no care for interpersonal interactions. We’ve become a whole society where no one values honest, meaningful communication. You can see it throughout your day. At home, work, school, on the beach, in the park, at the café, with your partner, spouse, and children. It may take some time to notice, but you’ve altered the course of your relationships. The nature of your interactions and your interpersonal communications have changed. The personal and intimate aspects of your connections are diminished. You’re left with interactions without care or purpose. Interactions without concern, empathy, or sympathy. Your life becomes littered with encounters lacking depth and connections. Are we severed?Yes. After a while, you realize we are all severed on some level. How many levels, in how many ways? The first delete is an act of severing. The first mute is an act of severing. Each and every block is severance. Refusing direct communication is severance. The show hasn’t gotten to any solutions yet, but we can certainly reverse course in our personal lives if the will and intent are present. Alternatively, people rarely change. In many cases their true character is exposed online. Self-preservation is a life saver. If you’ve made moves to save your life, do not reverse course! Non-fiction sci-fiSeverance seems very fresh and original while openly borrowing from classics. Sci-Fi used to be out-of-this-world futurism, but Severance flipped that and put a deep-thinking sci-fi mystery in the dullness of a two-tone basement office space. I suspect no one watching expected a sci-fi masterpiece to represent their current lived reality on any level. I didn’t. Yet I understand Severance most as a literal representation of our society as lived for the last two decades. Have you watched Severance? If so, what are your thoughts on real-life severance compared to what the show is showing us? Source: https://harvest-life.org/2025/05/19/severance-am-i-severed/
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Sunday, June 29, 2025
Severance: Am I Severed?
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