You Cannot Outsource Life: Severance and Wild Problems

In Season 1 of the TV show Severance, we learn that the main character, Mark Scout, once shared a life with his wife, Gemma, whose presumed death he mourns. In Season 2, the audience sees flashbacks of the highlights of their romantic life but also some profound pain they experienced (for example, a miscarriage). Maintaining a marriage through difficulties is a formative experience and contains elements of acute pain. 

In Severance, employees of the evil corporation Lumon Industries undergo a procedure that divides their consciousness in two. The “outie” enjoys weekends and a paycheck but remembers nothing of work. The “innie” performs the work but knows nothing of family or life outside the office.

Severance is not merely an action thriller, although the “innie” characters occasionally sneak or fight their way through the literal prison of Lumon. The philosophical dilemma presented in the show is that the characters’ free selves might be tempted to intentionally imprison parts of their lives that cause pain. Both Mark and Gemma had something they genuinely thought they might want to escape before becoming prisoners of Lumon. The audience is invited to consider the difference between reducing pain in the short run and undergoing the difficult process of forming a meaningful identity in a flawed world.

If work is unpleasant then the bargain seems efficient by a cost-benefit analysis. However, in his book Wild Problems, Russ Roberts encourages us not to make decisions strictly based on avoiding pain. For example, Russ proposes that many people would avoid having children if the decision were primarily based on short-term happiness. He argues that life’s most important choices involving vocation or parenthood cannot be solved by ordinary cost-benefit analysis. They are “wild problems” because the choice changes the person who makes it. You cannot fully know what it will be like to become a parent before becoming one, because parenthood helps create the future self who will evaluate the decision.

Someone making decisions based on “what makes me happiest this year?” might cooperate with Lumon. Rather than accepting that work, grief, and love may transform us, Lumon divides experience from identity.  An adult who is primarily asking, “Who do I want to become?” likely would reject the Lumon system (which most viewers would agree is good because then Lumon would have no prisoners). 

This problem is evident in the story of Mark and Gemma. Their marriage was not a sequence of perfectly happy experiences. They struggled with infertility. They fought. An empty wooden crib in their house came to represent their grief.

Lumon considers it a scientific accomplishment when a severed version of Gemma can dismantle the wooden crib without feeling the pain attached to it. The company imagines that, by removing her memory of the crib, it has conquered suffering.

Although I will refrain from explicitly spoiling the finale of Season 2, something happens in the room with that crib that turns the Lumon philosophy upside down and highlights the deeper satisfaction that comes with maintaining human connections through life’s tragedies. Mark and Gemma’s love does not exist independently of those memories. Their love has been formed partly through the way they endured those experiences together.

This does not mean that suffering automatically improves a marriage or a life. Pain can destroy people and relationships. Roberts’s point is that a meaningful life is not assembled by maximizing pleasant moments and deleting unpleasant ones. Some experiences matter because of what they reveal about character and commitment. Moreover, severance technology does not actually exist. We in the real world must therefore consider Roberts’s invitation to take the leap while knowing that we will have to experience all the pain ourselves.

Lumon treats pain as waste. Wild Problems asks whether pain may sometimes be inseparable from the person one has chosen to become. A connection between Severance and Wild Problems is that both consider whether we can obtain the life we want without being transformed by what it requires.

Russ’s answer is that this division misunderstands human flourishing. A life is not merely a collection of desirable outcomes. It is a coherent story that includes suffering and hopefully also offers some opportunity for profound love.

The promise of severance is to escape pain, possibly even a pain as trivial as attending one’s own dentist appointment. However, the show suggests that attempts to completely escape pain, even if the severance technology exists, ultimately leads away from freedom and ends up causing pain somewhere else. When free people try too hard to escape pain, their lives lose meaning and their society becomes oppressive.