Severance and the Self

A Lower-Dimensional Analogy of Identity, Suffering, and the Shape of What We Forget

🚨Spoiler Alert🚨— This article contains plot elements from Severance. If you haven’t seen the show, consider watching it first, unless you enjoy mysteries being revealed out of order. Which, might be fitting.

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I finished watching the season two finale of Severance this weekend. By the end, I found myself lost in thought about the concepts of selfhood, reincarnation, duality, and multiple dimensions. My head was spinning. I tried to explain my thoughts to my wife, and she just looked at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. To find it, I felt the best thing to do was attempt writing it out to better understand. And here we are.

I loved the show. It’s a brilliant work of art in so many ways. But I wasn’t thinking about Severance in the usual way. To me, it wasn’t just a corporate satire or a psychological thriller. I saw it as something else. A mirror. A visual metaphor. A kind of “lower-dimensional analogy” that helps us understand a much larger question. (I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute.)

The show doesn’t try to explain anything explicitly spiritual. It makes no mention of saṃsāra, anattā, Advaita Vedānta, or karma. And yet, it echoes them in subtle and profound ways. It gives us a way to question the nature of self by staying within this one life. It turns identity inside out, and invites us to ask what we really are, if not a single, seamless “me.”

It was poetic, in a deep metaphorical way. Still, I’m sure my recent mindset and reading material played a great deal into how I interpreted the show. I’ve spent the last year contemplating the meaning of “self” – who we are, what we think we are, and what we might actually be. I’ve been rereading Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching, as well as multiple books by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Ramana Maharshi, while also exploring many of the Buddhist Pali Canon for the first time. While each of these represent slight variations on the interpretation of self, there are clear underlying themes that question who we think we are.

Severance makes that tension visible in a uniquely modern way. For those that haven’t seen the show, I recommend watching it before reading further (incoming spoiler alerts!). However, if you decide to keep reading, know that each character is divided in their personality and memory with a microchip implanted in their brain. They have what the show calls an “innie” with no memory of the outside world, and an “outie” with no access to their work self. Two lives. One body. Separate identities. Neither fully free to understand their whole “true” self.

And yet, both sense themselves as “real” and whole. Both suffer. Both love. This isn’t about past lives. It points to the present, gently implying the underlying question of who we really are beneath the story we’re telling. It doesn’t force the metaphor. And that has been part of its beauty.

Hollywood so often misses the mark with reincarnation. It holds onto the ego of the protagonist and carries it forward. We want the main character to be recognizable, even across lifetimes. But that’s where the attempt seems to fall short.

Even within a single life, are we ever really the “same?” My wife often likes to say that we are not the same person from a year ago, or even last week. She’s right. We are always changing. But as we evolve our way of being, it seems that our memory of the past is what holds this construct of a self together. When the characters in Severance lose that, like someone waking from total amnesia, it puts into question who we are at all.

Perhaps it’s the meaning we bring to each moment. I love Viktor Frankl’s position that…

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment.”

Maybe that’s all we are. The next decision. The next reflection. A pattern in motion. And even if we could agree on who we are, there’s still the harder question: Why are we here?

The concepts of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism run through Severance in multiple ways. The rituals. The lifeless break rooms. The strange rewards for doing nothing. And still, they go on. Even in this life, we all do. Searching for meaning in a world that often refuses to give us one.

By the end of season two, the philosophical layers really start to stack. The characters carry grief they don’t understand. They fall in love without knowing why. They run toward something they can’t name. The final scene of Mark and Helly sprinting down the hallway was the ultimate rebellion against the absurdity of it all. They don’t know what they’ll find. They just know they have to run. They seem to be doing so in spite of their destiny, refusing to take the fated route – striving for some illusion of freedom.

It echoed something Albert Camus once wrote – a line that keeps circling back for me:

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

That’s what it felt like. Not a resolution. Not an answer. Just the choice to keep moving toward something “true.”

I don’t know if the creators of Severance meant it to be interpreted this way. Perhaps this is all in my head, but if you’ve been wondering about these things too, maybe I’m not as crazy as my wife thinks I am (please comment, as I’d love some vindication 🙂).

To me, this poetic script seemed like a form of “lower-dimensional analogy.”

Let me explain what I mean by that…

What is a Lower-Dimensional Analogy?

Let’s start with Flatland.

If you’ve never heard of it, Flatland is a short satirical novel written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott. It imagines a world where everything exists in only two dimensions. The inhabitants are lines, triangles, circles – geometric shapes that can slide around but can’t see above or below. They can only perceive length and width. No depth.

Now imagine a sphere (a three-dimensional object) passing through Flatland. The Flatlanders wouldn’t see a sphere. They’d see a single point, then a widening circle, then a shrinking circle, and then… nothing. The moment it leaves their plane, it disappears.

To the Flatlanders, that makes no sense. They have no concept of “up.” But to us, the viewers, it’s obvious. The sphere was just passing through in a dimension they couldn’t see.

Carl Sagan famously used this metaphor in his 1980 series Cosmos to explain the idea of higher dimensions. Rather than trying to replicate that explanation, I’ll let you watch it here. It’s still one of the clearest visualizations out there.

So why does this matter?

Because this kind of metaphor (this step-down in dimension) can help us understand things that otherwise feel impossible. We take something massive and hard to picture, and we flatten it. Not to reduce it, but to make it visible from where we are.

That’s what I mean by a “lower-dimensional analogy.”

We use a smaller, simpler framework to help us grasp something bigger and more abstract. We don’t need to fully understand the higher dimension to feel its presence. We just need a reference point. A flicker of recognition.

We see this kind of thinking in quantum physics too – especially when we try to explain the “spooky” behavior of entangled particles. Quantum entangled photons maintain a relationship with each other no matter how far apart they are. When photon A is entangled with photon B, their polarization states are directly correlated, and any change to one appears to affect the other instantly. On the surface, it looks like information is traveling faster than light, violating Einstein’s theory of relativity.

But if we think of it through the Flatland lens, the paradox softens. Imagine a steering wheel-shaped object entering Flatland. The Flatlanders don’t see a wheel. They see two disconnected circles appear when the cross-section intersects their world. As the wheel turns, the circles shift: one goes “up,” the other “down.” To them, it looks like two separate things are reacting in perfect coordination across spacetime, with no visible connection.

But we know the truth: they’re part of the same object. They just can’t see the dimension that makes that connection obvious. That’s the power of a lower-dimensional analogy.

In the same way that Flatland helps us imagine a fourth spatial dimension, Severance helps us imagine a deeper dimension of the self.

It doesn’t try to explain the soul or the cycle of saṃsāra or any spiritual doctrine outright. But it gives us a way to feel what forgetting might look like. What it might feel like to live only part of a life. To exist as a fragment of something larger.

And that’s the brilliance of it.

The show doesn’t lecture. It doesn’t need to. It lowers the dimensional complexity just enough to let us wonder.

So what does this have to do with who we think we are and why we are here?

Let’s keep going…

A Brief Primer on Spiritual and Philosophical Terminology

Before we can explore the layered metaphors in the show about who we are and why we are here, we need a few definitions.

This section offers a very cursory overview of saṃsāra, karma, dukkha, anattā, Advaita Vedānta, as well as a few existential philosophies that echo similar ideas. If you’re already familiar with these terms, feel free to skip ahead to the next section. But if you’d like a quick primer, read on.

Across spiritual traditions, philosophical frameworks, and even modern psychology, there’s been one consistent question behind it all: What is the self? And closely behind it: What is its purpose? I’m not proposing the “truth” of any one belief system here. These ideas aren’t presented as answers, but as perspectives that invite deeper reflection. They are some of the many ways some eastern religions and philosophical traditions have tried to describe the mystery of existence over the last few thousand years. You don’t have to agree with them to consider what they’re pointing toward.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the answer often begins with saṃsāra: the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This cycle continues until we “wake up” to the true nature of reality. In these traditions, most people live life after life without remembering the ones before. In each life, we habitually cling to desires, chase meaning in impermanent things, and act out the same patterns until we’re ready to let go. The wheel keeps turning until we finally “wake up.”

But you don’t need to believe in literal reincarnation for the metaphor to hold power. We change form constantly, moving through stages of identity: child to adult, student to worker, parent to elder. Sometimes we can forget our old selves as we grow into new ones, but hopefully not as dramatically as a literal reincarnation.

What keeps the wheel spinning is karma. Not in the pop culture sense of instant justice, but as cause and effect: the momentum of action. Karma draws us into situations we haven’t fully resolved. The things we avoid tend to repeat until we see them clearly. The things we cling to eventually dissolve. In this view, we’re here to learn what we haven’t yet learned, to face what we haven’t yet faced.

This naturally brings us to dukkha: the fundamental dissatisfaction woven through all of conditioned experience. Things change. People leave. Bodies age. Meaning slips away just as we think we’ve found it. According to Buddhist thought, recognizing this suffering is the first step toward seeing through it.

Then comes anattā, the doctrine of no-self. In Buddhist teachings, this is what allows us to see past dukkha. It says that the self we usually defend (our identity, our preferences, our story) isn’t fixed. It’s a temporary pattern of memory and reaction. It’s not that we don’t exist, but that the “I” we cling to isn’t as solid as we think. Letting go of that illusion loosens suffering’s grip.

A different view comes from Advaita Vedānta, a non-dual school of Hindu philosophy. It teaches that the self we identify with (what we usually call “I”) is an illusion. Beneath that illusion is ātman, the “true self,” which is not separate from Brahman, the source of all existence. There is only one thing, appearing as many. In this view, we’re not lost individuals trying to find our way back. We’re already home, we just haven’t realized it yet.

These aren’t the only frameworks that try to answer the question of meaning. In modern Western philosophy, there are three major responses to the idea that the universe holds no intrinsic purpose: existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism. Existentialism says that meaning doesn’t exist until we create it through our own actions and integrity. Nihilism agrees that life has no built-in meaning, but concludes there’s no point in seeking one. Absurdism sits in between. It accepts the futility, but responds with rebellion. It laughs at the lack of answers, then lives on anyway.

Each concept offers a different way of answering the same core questions: Who am I, and what am I doing here?

This is only a primer. There’s far more depth in each of these perspectives. I’ll share a few resources at the end for anyone who wants to explore further. But for now, let’s step back into the metaphor and see how Severance begins to embody these ideas in the lives of its characters.

Severance as Spiritual Metaphor

It’s worth restating that nowhere in Severance is there a mention of reincarnation, spiritual awakening, or even existential philosophy. The show offers almost no religious language or overt metaphysics (the only direct reference I remember comes from Burt’s outie, who gestures toward the promise of salvation in Heaven). And yet, the parallels seem layered and unmistakable – embedded so deeply in the structure of the story I couldn’t unsee them. As all great works of art do, Severance evokes questions it never explicitly asks.

It began with Mark. In season one, we meet him as a man broken by grief. He believes his wife is dead, and in that pain, he turns to Severance. Not to end his suffering, but to delegate it. To let part of himself forget. The goal is simple: another self who doesn’t remember the loss. A clean slate. But it doesn’t work. His innie ends up in another cycle entirely: new desires, new pain, a search for new meaning. The same pattern, wrapped in a different story. There’s a beauty in it, but also a sad redundancy. A karmic repetition.

Irving, too, spends his days immersed in structure, following strict patterns, even painting the same hallway over and over again at home. Ms. Cobel plays the part of enforcer. She’s the guardian of the “karmic” cycle, clinging to order, ritual, and the invisible purpose behind it all. Each of them is caught in a loop. And each thinks there’s something to be gained if they just stay the course.

This, in many ways, is the texture of dukkha – suffering not as catastrophe, but as conditioned experience. We see it most clearly through Gemma in season two. With every new quota met, a new version of her is “born” into a new room. She lives through a string of surreal lives: a dental appointment, a forced thank-you note, scripted kindness. All of it laced with discomfort. None of it remembered. In the flashbacks of her outside world, she suffers the pain of infertility. On the inside, as Ms. Casey, she plays the part of nurturer to strangers she doesn’t know. And somehow, all of it is voluntary. She returns willingly. There’s a quiet, tragic hope in it. Maybe this time, she’ll find her husband again. Maybe this loop will be the one that means something. And in that hope, the metaphor lands: we all strive toward something just out of reach. We endure pain because we think the next horizon will redeem it. This reflects the suffering we often perpetuate without realizing it. We try to bypass what hurts. We try to become someone new. But the pattern persist.

It also asks us to question identity itself. Who are we, if we can become another person through memory alone? Helly and Helena are not the same person (or are they?). They make different choices. They value different things. Also, Mark’s ‘innie’ asks his ‘outie’ whether, if they ever merge, it wouldn’t be the ‘outie’ who remains, because he has more memory. More time. A longer story. The idea that memory defines self is strong in the show. But is that all we are? Are we the one who remembers? Or are we something else entirely? Something behind the remembering?

Advaita Vedānta suggests that we are not the memory or the mind at all. It says that beneath our sense of “I” is a deeper self: ātman, which is not separate from the source of everything. The illusion is not just in the story we tell, but in the belief that we are separate to begin with. Whether that idea finds its way into Severance is unclear. But the longing for something more unified, for a return to wholeness, pulses underneath so many of the show’s quietest moments.

We also see the philosophical tensions of meaning and purpose play out in the characters. Mark, in his pursuit of meaning, shows the core of existentialism: the belief that we must create purpose through choice. Dylan teeters on the edge of nihilism, especially as he realizes how empty the system really is, ready to end it all with a figurative death of resignation. But then, after receiving a response from his ‘outie’ near the end of season two, he makes a different choice. He rebels as the classical absurdist. He comes back and helps Helly slam the vending machine into the door and hold off Mr. Milchick. Irving lives somewhere in between. His rituals and his loyalty hint at longing. His art says something else. He senses that meaning exists, even if he can’t name it. And Helly remains unresolved. Is she Helly? Is she Helena? Or is she both?

And then there’s Lumon itself – a structure so elaborate, so arbitrary, it feels like a parody of capitalism, or control, or the entire system we’ve all constructed and now live inside. You could write an entire paper on the parallels between materialism and the way we try to build systems that protect us, guide us, even help us grow, but in the end, become the very prisons we can’t escape. I’ll resist the urge to go deeper on that one for now. But it’s worth naming.

The rituals of Lumon echo so many of the questions and the reflections on absurdism as well. The waffle party. The goat room. The ceremonial kindness of the Wellness Room. Each one is performed with intensity. Taken seriously. And yet, as a viewer, you can’t help but laugh – or ache. These scenes prod at our own lives. How many of our rituals are just as absurd? How many roles do we take seriously that might, in another light, be a cosmic joke?

And yet, love persists.

Even without memory, the innies reach for one another. Mark falls in love again, unaware that the woman he lost is the woman he’s found. Irving paints stairwells without knowing why. Dylan holds the lever or slams the vending machine for others, not himself. These aren’t grand spiritual awakenings. They’re small acts of tenderness. And they matter.

Watching the innies suffer can be brutal. Sometimes they hurt each other. Sometimes they don’t know how to care or find compassion within themselves. As an audience, you almost want to reach through the screen and shake them – tell them it’s not worth it. Remind them to be kind. I’ve had that same feeling as a father. Watching my kids yell at each other, only to realize I’m yelling at them to stop. The irony is not lost on me. It never is.

By the end of season one, we’re left with something close to transcendence. Mark, holding the photo of his wife, realizes who she is. And in that moment, something clicks. He remembers – not just her, but what he’s doing here in this life at all. He finds purpose. And then in the season two finale, we return to his question – almost resolving his purpose in reconnecting with his wife. Almost. But then he turns and runs in the other direction. Running. Mark and Helly sprint down the hallway, not to escape, but to exist. To love. To be free. It’s not liberation in a cosmic sense. But it’s something.

And maybe that’s enough.

These were some of the moments I couldn’t unsee, each echoing the deeper questions of who we are and why we’re here. They’re what made the parallels to saṃsāra, dukkha, anattā, and the rest impossible to ignore. The characters forget who they are. They suffer. They repeat. But somehow, through all of it, they keep reaching for something real. Something whole. Something free.

All of us continue to strive to better understand ourselves. All of us seem drawn toward the same inalienable desires: freedom, love, belonging. We don’t always know why. The source of those longings is hard to pin down. But they feel real. They feel fundamental. Like gravity.

Something pulls us forward. Even when we don’t remember why.

So Who Are You, Really?

Maybe that’s the question this show never asks directly, but never stops whispering. Not just Who are you? – but, Who are you if you forget?

And what remains when the forgetting becomes the story?

By now, I’m not trying to convince anyone of a particular doctrine or belief system. This isn't about reincarnation, or Buddhism, or physics, or a particular philosophy. It’s about what stories (the great stories) allow us to glimpse when we let them in sideways.

For me, Severance became one of those stories. A layered metaphor that started with a corporate mystery and ended somewhere far more human. The show never said anything about eastern religious doctrine or specific philosophical schools of thought. And yet, once I saw the parallels, I couldn’t unsee them. Like a good optical illusion, it rearranged something in how I watched. And maybe in how I live.

If we are like Flatlanders – still tracing the edges of our own shadow, mistaking depth for surface, and meaning for structure – what would it mean to look “up?”

What would we see if we caught a glimpse, however briefly, of the fourth wall cracking?

Of a self not defined by story or memory, but by something deeper still?

Maybe it’s not something to answer. Maybe it’s something we practice noticing. In the rituals we perform, the roles we play, and the moments that break through anyway – love, compassion, laughter, pain. The quiet sense that something matters, even when we can’t say why.

I don’t know the answers. I doubt that any of us really do, but maybe that’s the point – just to sit with the questions.

If nothing else, maybe the meaning of life isn’t something we find. Maybe it’s something we create – together. In small gestures. In shared absurdities. In learning to walk each other through the mystery, without clinging too hard to the map.

And maybe, just maybe, as Alan Watts reminds us, the whole thing is a bit funnier than we thought.

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
—Alan Watts

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Some Additional Resources

The explanations of various terms in this piece were intentionally brief – more brushstrokes than blueprints. The goal was to introduce a few core ideas and offer a way of seeing in order to reflect a way of thinking I found helpful in making sense of this show. My goal was not to provide exhaustive coverage of the traditions behind them. However, if something here sparked your curiosity and you want to explore these ideas further, below are a few recommended books and resources that can take you deeper.

This is not a definitive list, by any means. They’re starting points. Places to revisit the questions: Who are we? and, Why are we here? through the language of other seekers.

A Few Books and Teachings to Explore Further

(Should You Wish to Wander)

Noble Truths, Noble Path by Bhikkhu Bodhi
A curated text on the essence of the Buddha’s original teachings that describe the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, with Bodhi’s introductory commentary throughout.

Three Indian Spiritual Classics: (1) The Dhammapada, (2) The Bhagavad Gita, and (3) The Upanishads
There are multiple translations of these. I have enjoyed the Dhammapada’s translation by Ananda Maitreya, as well as Eknath Easwaran’s translations of the other two texts.

Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing) by Lao-Tzu (Laozi)
Again, there are multiple translations of this text. Personally, I most enjoyed Ken Liu’s version on Audible.

I AM THAT by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
This is a series of discourses with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj on his views of the self: perceived illusions and true self. A deep reflection from one of India’s greatest sages, a view through his direct experience.

Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, edited by David Godman
A deep dive into the world of Advaita Vedānta through the teachings of the sage who has said to have achieved liberation while living, as a “Jivanmukta.”

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
The classic absurdist manifesto — existential without despair, and anchored in rebellion through joy.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
A Holocaust survivor’s reflection on purpose, responsibility, and what makes life worth living. A foundational existentialist work that resonates across traditions.

Irrational Man by William Barrett
A readable overview of existentialism, tracing its roots from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre. Great for context and historical flow.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
A mind-expanding gateway into non-dual thinking and Advaita Vedānta, delivered with humor, wisdom, and philosophical ease.

The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
A foundational collection of Krishnamurti’s teachings, exploring topics like fear, thought, self, and freedom. It’s deeply reflective and invites the reader to explore truth through direct observation rather than inherited doctrine. It includes a compelling introduction by Aldous Huxley, which helps frame Krishnamurti’s unique philosophical voice.

And one of my all time favorites…

The Island by Aldous Huxley
A utopian novel that imagines a world shaped by Eastern philosophical ideals – and what it might look like if we all paused to pay attention to the beauty all around us.

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If you made it this far, Wow! Thank you for reading.

If this piece stirred something: an idea, a question, a quiet nod you didn’t expect, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment below and share what it made you think about. What did you see in Severance that I might have missed?

Also, I’d really appreciate some validation that I’m not crazy. My wife definitely thinks I am. Help me out here. 😉

We're all just trying to make sense of things. Let's wonder together.