Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

25 November 2025

4 min read

Pluribus and the problem with “Good Vibes Only”

When only misery can save the world

Joshua Bloor

Joshua Bloor is a pastor, author, and New Testament scholar.

A passenger oeers out and down the aisle of an empty plane.

Rhea Seehorn stars.

Apple TV.

Imagine waking up to discover that the whole world is suddenly happy and whole. Overnight, an alien virus has swept the globe, and its effects are astonishing: everyone joins a single joyful hive mind. Everyone is connected. Content. At peace. The anxious inner voice that once whispered fear and worry is hushed. Humanity, it seems, has finally found contentment.

Except, there’s one problem.

You’re immune.

While everyone else partakes in this glee, you remain fully yourself. Still anxious, still low, still wrestling with the angst of life. To make matters worse, you’re surrounded by legions of the blissfully enslaved. You’ve never felt more alone.

At first glance, this premise sounds strange, maybe absurd. Yet Pluribus (Latin for “many”), from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, is devastatingly insightful. Carol Sturka, portrayed with raw emotional precision by Rhea Seehorn, is the most miserable person on Earth.

During “the Joining,” everyone else is absorbed into a harmonious hive mind who self-identify as “we.” They remain fully functional, thoughtful, and emotionally engaged human beings. They are hardline pacifists, utterly convinced they are liberating humans from conflict, negative emotions, and ultimately, from themselves. In their eyes, they haven’t lost anything. They’ve simply traded their individual suffering for collective contentment. Finally, humanity has become what it was always meant to be—happy! Except they can’t quite figure out how Carol, and a few others, remain unchanged.

Oddly, Carol’s incapacity for happiness becomes humanity’s final hope. Her depression, the very thing that weighs her down, is now her superpower. Carol’s misery makes her immune, yet the challenge she faces is unique: How can she convince people they need saving when they’ve never been “happier”?

Many of us are taught from childhood to avoid sadness— “Cheer up, you’re fine.” In a world of inspirational quotes and booming wellness industries, sadness feels wrong. Yet valuing only positive feelings sets an impossible standard. People end up feeling like they must avoid sadness at all costs. It’s no wonder many of us feel ashamed or anxious when we have a bad day. Like the Pluribus hive-mind, cheerfulness is mandatory, and anything less is seen as “broken.”

Ironically, studies show that the societal pressure to feel happy (and never sad) is linked to poorer mental health. Neuroscientists have found that when children grow up in families where emotions aren’t named, noticed, or welcomed, it actually shapes how their brains develop. The regions responsible for managing feelings and handling stress don’t grow as strongly as they should.

When parents respond to a child’s emotions—comforting them when they cry, delighting when they’re happy, sitting with them when they’re sad—it has the effect of watering a garden. Those emotional pathways in the brain strengthen, deepen, and flourish.

But when feelings are ignored, dismissed, or shut down, it’s like a garden left unwatered. The soil dries. Growth stalls. The neural pathways that support healthy emotional regulation don’t develop in the way they were meant to.

The long-term impact can be significant. Children who aren’t allowed to express their feelings often grow into adults who struggle with anxiety, depression, or chronic stress. Their nervous systems learn to stay on high alert, and regulating emotions becomes much harder than it should be.

Sadness in fact reminds us of what truly matters and what gives our life meaning. Far from being purely negative, it can ground us, deepen empathy, and make joy feel more genuine. Hiding or suppressing sadness actually intensifies it; what psychologists call “amplification.”

Feeling happy, then, is not life’s goal, human flourishing is; living well and doing well. The ancient Greeks had a word for it, eudaimonia, often mistranslated as “happiness” but better understood as “flourishing” or “living the good life.” This way of living life and flourishing includes struggle and growth.

This is where Pluribus makes a dramatic point. By eradicating personal pain, the hive mind also erases depth of feeling. Humanity gains perpetual comfort, but at the expense of authentic connection. Carol’s misery keeps her tethered to reality — she is the only one who can remind the Joined of what love and meaning truly feel like, because she alone remembers what it’s like to suffer. In ending world suffering, they’ve also ended love, since real love includes the possibility of loss and suffering.

As Dostoevsky suggested, suffering is not just pain, it is wounded love. Hell, as Father Zossima claims in Brothers Karamazov, “is the suffering of being unable to love.” This is true on a divine level. Because if God cannot suffer, then God cannot love, either.

With Pluribus, Carol’s desolation becomes a form of resistance—an insistence that authentic human experience demands the full spectrum of emotion. She’s not fighting for the right to be happy; she’s fighting for the right to be real. And with the series still unfolding, one question lingers: can Carol save the world from its own happiness? Can her sadness persuade others that real life includes both the highs and the lows?

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.