I watched Severance when it first came out. Like a lot of folks, I saw it as a brilliant analogy for the alienation we feel from ourselves because our labor is exchanged for money rather than directly nurturing us as it once did.
We don’t own what we produce, we have little control of our own work and we’re often pitted against one another in competition for that raise, window office, Chinese finger traps & waffle parties. Marx talked about this—how our labor, our time, our energy, once a part of us, gets separated, sold, and turned into something that no longer belongs to us. That’s exactly what Severance is. I mean they don’t even know what they are doing.
We trade our hours to corporations, we sell off our days, and in exchange, we get just enough money to survive. We come home at the end of it, too drained to do anything except pour a drink, make dinner, and stare at a screen for a couple of hours before passing out and doing it all over again. Our best hours, our most vibrant energy, goes somewhere else. It doesn’t belong to us anymore. And after years of this, we start to forget who we even are outside of it.
That was my first takeaway. That was the meaning Severance held for me the first time I watched it.
The Second Severance Watch Party
The second time I watched it, I got something a little different from it.
What if we—as in humanity—are the real severed ones? Not just from our jobs, but from ourselves, from each other, from nature, from the very essence of life?
Because isn’t that what we’ve done? Split ourselves up, snipped our connection to the whole, and now we’re wandering around, pretending we’re separate, pretending we don’t belong to each other?
These days it’s not just our labor that’s being sucked from us but now our attention is being sold off in bite sized reels, likes, alerts, texts and emails.
Instead of connecting over dinner, we trade updates on the latest outrage. Instead of being present with each other, we pose and capture our moments to share with others on media platforms that sell us.
The Cosmic Serpent
Anthropologist Jeremy Narby explored something strikingly similar in his book, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. Through fieldwork with Amazonian shamans, Narby found that their visionary experiences often revealed serpentine imagery that looked uncannily like DNA’s double helix. Across cultures—ancient Egypt, Mesoamerica, and beyond—serpents, coils, and twisted ladders appear in mythology as symbols of life force and interconnectedness.
Narby’s insight is this: at some deeper level, we already know that life intimately connected, interdependent forming a single living whole. DNA itself is a universal code shared between all species across eons, uniting us with all living things now and in the future. Yet, in the modern world, we’ve forgotten—or we’ve chosen to forget—the real meaning of these cosmic threads.
Stuck In The Cubicles Of Our Own Little Mind
In Severance, each character’s “innie” is trapped in a windowless workplace, where exchanges between co-workers are a rare indulgence. Yet those same workers, once they leave the office, become “outies” who remain largely oblivious to the exploitation of their own inner selves.
This is not just a sci-fi premise. We have “outies” who get to live in comfort, detached from what’s happening, and “innies” who are stuck in an endless, inescapable nightmare. And the worst part? We pretend the “outie” version of ourselves has nothing to do with it. It’s us, every day, when we compartmentalize or ignore our deeper awareness that the pain of another is our own pain, and that we’re all connected—by ecology, and by literal threads of DNA.
Life isn’t about individual survival. Never was. It’s about continuity, interdependence, weaving ourselves into the larger tapestry. Nature knew this. The birds know this. The mycelium networks under our feet—whispering chemical messages through the soil—know this. But we? We got severed.
We believed the illusion of the ego, the “me,” the “mine.” We forgot that the pain of another is our own pain. That the displacement of a people is the displacement of all people. That severance from each other is a slow death.
Narby’s shamans don’t see a boundary between their minds and nature; they live in a world where the forest’s psyche and the human psyche intermingle. They recognize the “cosmic serpent” as part of their own being. By contrast, we tend to seal ourselves off in individual, isolated boxes – removed from each other’s suffering, from the environment we depend on, and often from our own inner wisdom and intuition.
Remain Severed or Reconnect?
The tragedy is that we don’t see this severance for what it is. It feels normal to chase promotions and corporate trinkets, to tune out the suffering of strangers halfway around the globe, or even the suffering of our next-door neighbor. But sometimes, we remember: a protest that unites strangers, a baby’s cooing that stops time, a walk through the moss covered forest where something ancient in us exhales and says, “Yes, this is home.”
Severance— the real one, not just the show —is ultimately a choice. At some point, we have to realize that this is a lie. The suffering of others is not separate from us. The destruction of the planet is not happening to someone else. The violence and greed that fuel all of this are not just abstract evils—they are the result of our own severance, our own refusal to see that we belong to each other. We can decide whether to keep splitting ourselves off into smaller and smaller warring groups or if we reclaim our inherent unity.
We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
The Political Severance: We Are We Losing Our Minds?
Yup, it’s no secret that politics is a disaster right now. But it’s not just the issues—it’s how we talk (or, more accurately, don’t talk) about them. We’re so divided, so reactionary, that we’ve stopped thinking at all. Instead of conversations, we have battles. Instead of listening, we strategize our next attack. Instead of curiosity, we have certainty—rock-solid, unshakable, take-it-to-the-grave certainty.
I recently finished What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban, and it laid out his theory of why we’re all turning into ideological zealots (with drawings). It’s not that we’re bad people—it’s that our brains are wired for survival. When faced with a belief that contradicts our own, we don’t pause to evaluate it; we react. We fight. We defend. We categorize. Us vs. them. Good vs. evil. And in that moment, we don’t just reject the opposing view—we reject the person holding it. They’re not just wrong; they’re dangerous. And suddenly, even considering another perspective feels like a betrayal of our own side.
That’s the real problem. It’s not just that we’re divided—it’s that we’re stuck. Stuck in our own beliefs, stuck in the narrative our group espouses, stuck in a fear loop that keeps us from even questioning whether we agree with everything our team says. And God forbid we voice a dissenting thought.
I’ve been there. There are ideas that I hear all the time that don’t fully sit right with me, but I stay quiet because, well, I know the rules. One that nagged at me when my daughter pulled into a photo of a chocolate mold the teacher had made of an ethnic mask? When we were told over and over again that intent doesn’t matter—only the harm caused matters. And sure, I get why people say that. If you hurt someone, they’re hurt, regardless of what you meant. But all I can think is—intent does matter. A huge amount. There’s a massive difference between someone accidentally shoving me and someone deliberately shoving me because they hate me. My pain, my reaction, the whole situation—totally different. But did I say that out loud when I heard people confidently declaring otherwise? Hell no. Because I knew that was not how people were thinking on my team. And if I spoke up? I knew how that would go down.
That’s how you know when you’ve entered zealot territory—when dissent feels dangerous. When you know you disagree with something but keep your mouth shut because it’s safer. When questioning a belief isn’t just frowned upon, but seen as treason. And from there, it spirals:
- If we can’t listen to another viewpoint without immediately reacting, we’ve lost the plot.
- If we shut down conversations, ban books, cancel people for asking the wrong questions—we’re not protecting truth, we’re shielding ourselves from it.
- If our beliefs can never be questioned, they’ve stopped being beliefs and become dogma.
- If we feel a sick thrill when someone with an opposing view gets destroyed in a debate, that’s not justice—it’s just ego.
- If we use shame as a weapon to silence others, we’re not arguing in good faith—we’re bullying.
- If we’re always angry at the other side, addicted to outrage, and convinced that they are the problem.
Because at the end of the day, the biggest threat isn’t “the other side.” The biggest threat is when we become so certain, so rigid, so terrified of our own curiosity, that we lose the ability to think for ourselves. And once that happens? We’re not solving problems. We’re just picking teams to fight on.
My Red Pill Moment: What Happens When You Actually Listen?
A few days ago, I watched The Red Pill, a documentary by Cassie Jaye, a feminist filmmaker who set out to explore the Men’s Rights Movement. I went into it expecting to cringe, and honestly, there was a lot to cringe at (leaving out the numbers of women who end up in the hospital or dead from domestic violence, that women have been denied access to the high risk jobs that men die in, poverty levels for single moms, that women who were raped had nowhere to turn until the Rape Kit was created etc.). A lot of it felt messy, defensive, not entirely well-thought-out.
But here’s what surprised me: I actually listened.
And when I did, I found that buried in all the noise were some valid points—ideas that could be a part of feminism rather than framed as the enemy of it. Because at the core, weren’t they fighting for the same thing? The destruction of gender roles? The dismantling of a system that tells men and women and everyone in between how they must behave in order to be accepted, love and respected?
I started thinking about how severed these movements had become, when in reality, they could totally be allies.
But, this is what we do isn’t it? Not just in gender politics, but in everything. We take ideas that could work together and rip them apart. We pick a side and refuse to budge, even when the common goal is staring us in the face.
What If There Are No Sides?
Have you ever asked yourself “What if we’ve been playing the game all wrong?” What if the real trick being played on us isn’t about left vs. right, men vs. women, worker vs. boss, but something deeper, more sinister, more severed?
We’ve been so conditioned to pick a team, to stake our claim in the ideological battlefield, that we never stop to ask: Who benefits from us being this divided?
Because when we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not questioning the system that keeps us exhausted, alienated, afraid. We’re not building something better.
It’s a fundamental lie we’ve been sold: the lie that we are separate. That your suffering isn’t my problem. That your humanity stops where mine begins. That if I win, you must lose.
But if there’s one thing that history, biology, and every ancient spiritual tradition teaches us, it’s this: separation is an illusion.
The indigenous tribes knew it. The mycelium network beneath our feet whispers it. The DNA spiraling inside every living thing screams it.
We don’t have to play this game. We can refuse the severance.
We can decide—right now—to stop choosing sides and start choosing each other.
Because at the end of the day, there’s no us vs. them.
There’s only us.
Photo by Douglas Schneiders: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-in-modern-office-corridor-at-night-30479225/
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