Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

Work

4 February 2025

4 min read

Severance: the ins and outs of seeking oblivion

We can't contain trauma to just one sphere of our lives.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

In a retro-future styled office, workers stand or sit around a pod of desks.

Apple TV.

How far would you go to stop yourself doing late-night emails? Or what would you be willing to do to escape those painful memories? Severance, returning for its second season on AppleTV+, explores an extreme solution to both.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon who have had their memories severed: when outside of work they do not remember what they do at work and when at work they do not know anything about their lives outside. The work-self, referred to as an 'innie', enters the elevator at 5pm and immediately finds themselves back in the elevator at 9am the next day. They feel rested without any memory of the rest. Their "outie" blinks at 9am and then it is 5pm.

Adam Scott's protagonist, Mark, joined Lumon Industries as a severed employee working in "Macrodata Refinement" (MDR) as a result of losing his wife. In an episode early in the second season, one character recounts Mark telling them that he applied for the role because it felt like he was "choking on her ghost." Being severed offers Mark hours each working day where a version of him can work oblivious to this grief.

Of course, Mark's employer is up to something sinister, though exactly what remains unclear even to the innies. Lumon is at times terrifying, at times goofy and always unsettling. Innies are mistreated but cannot communicate with their outie beyond what Lumon allows. Even in these conditions, the small MDR team, each with no more than a couple of years' worth of memories, find purpose in their relationships with one another and in seeking to understand their bosses' designs.

Severance has attracted a lot of attention and reflection. Writing for the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs concludes that the show points us to our impossible longing for a boundaried life. The Northeastern University academic Tomas Elliot proposes that Severance can be read as an inversion of The Matrix: employees knowingly placing themselves in a state of naivety. Jacobs and Elliot both read the show as pointing to the paradoxical nature of modern work as both the cause of discontentment and the place many look to for a sense of purpose and fulfilment.

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other.

At the heart of many of the questions that Severance raises is the relationship between work and identity. Most of us live with a sense that who we are is found in our relationships. Work means something because it is one of the places we are most powerfully shaped by and shape relationships with colleagues, competitors, consumers and everyone else. Work becomes destructive when it cultivates destructive relationships in the workplace or when it displaces other forms of community and sources of identity.

The process of severance protects outies from the formative power of workplace relationships: their strains and their joys. No doubt we could each imagine benefits to this. However, it leaves Mark's outie paralysed by grief because he has denied himself a key source of relationships through which he could begin to heal, integrating that grief into a new sense of self.

Just as Mark's innie is protected by the outie's grief, the outie is protected from discovering who he could be without his wife. As the series progresses, it becomes less clear whether Mark's motivation is the fear of grief's crushing burden or the fear that one day the burden may ease.

In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa writes:

Time and again, human beings come to discover that they can become "different people" in different contexts. And under the highly dynamic conditions of late modernity, the task of finding out who we really are collides… with repeatedly having to "reinvent" and creatively redefine ourselves. That said reinvention also should be "completely authentic" is surely one of the more pointed paradoxes of the present age.

As Rosa notes, the dynamism of contemporary market forces produces a dynamism in our sense of identity, which can be experienced as instability. One response to this instability—and all the other humiliations and challenges of living at this time—is to look for ways of separating "work" and "life", to carve out a space where I can be free from constant performance and reinvention. And yet, as Severance shows us, whatever part of ourselves we designate as "life" or "outie", it cannot be free from pain and sometimes we will escape to, rather than from, "work".

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other. Some things must be resisted and some must simply be lived with. Both can only be done together. Ultimately, both can only be done if we are held in and defined by a relationship secure through any failure or loss. Seeking such a relationship is a life's work, for both innies and outies.

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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.