Everyone seems crazy about Severance. One of the first shows in a while to be a true “water cooler” show, it has a 96 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics and 76 percent from audiences. It’s spawned an entire cottage industry of YouTube sleuths theorizing about every clue the show’s given to the show’s mystery. It’s even crossed political boundaries, with everyone from Eileen Jones at Jacobin and Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire calling it “the best show on television”.

　　It’s easy to see why people love it. Severance is an epic classic with heroes, villains, and romantic intrigue. It wrestles with both universal questions and very modern anxieties about how work and the structures of our lives contribute to our feelings of meaninglessness. Plus, its attention to detail and ever-present mystery give people plenty of opportunities to theorize about what will happen next. (Spoilers for both seasons of Severance to follow.)

　　The show follows a man named Mark Scout (Adam Scott) who works for a shady corporation called Lumon where all the employees on Marks floor—including him—partake in a “severing” process. This means that when they’re outside of work they have no memories of being inside work. And when they are inside, they know nothing about their lives and identities on the outside. While both versions of them are told by Lumon about what is supposedly going on with the other Mark (including the severing procedure), it becomes increasingly clear that Lumon is not to be trusted. So both versions of Mark begin to secretly investigate the company. Season 2 ramps up the story begun in the first, where Mark discovered both on the inside (his “innie”) and on the outside (his “outie”) that his wife is alive. In both incarnations he is working to undermine Lumon and rescue her.

　　One of the biggest ideas Severance deals with is “alienation.” Karl Marx developed a theory of alienation that said the modern world—and capitalism in particular—alienated us from ourselves and our work. According to Marx, what we make with our work is essential to our identity. But he contended that capitalism alienates us first by demanding high levels of specialization in the work we do and then by removing us from the fruits of our labor. We no longer make shoes to give to a son or sell to a neighbor. Instead, we make the rubber on the sole, send it to someone else,and never see the person who wears the shoes. Nor do we get paid for the shoes we make directly. We’re paid a wage for our time and someone else gets the profit on the shoe.

　　Alienation is all over Severance. The characters home and work lives are literally alienated—“severed”—from each other. There is a deep incompleteness in each version of themselves. Mark and his coworker Dylan are both aimless consumers and loafs in their outie lives, lacking work to give them purpose. Meanwhile, the innies have nothing but work, unable to develop real relationships with anyone because they and their coworkers can be fired at any time. Nor can they find satisfaction in the work itself because it is also alienating. They move numbers around a screen all day with no sense of the larger goals this labor ostensibly serves. The show makes viewers feel that same sense of alienation by keeping them disoriented and grasping for a plot. Important sections of time between innies and outies are regularly skipped, leaving viewers with no clear sense of context or continuity. Lumon tries to compensate for this meaninglessness by constant reminders that Lumon is a family and a religion—there is a kind of cult worship of their founder Kier, and the place is filled with holy books, sayings, paintings, and hushed, reverent uses of his name and example—but this rings hollow since the innies know they can be discarded at any time. (As the meme goes, “If you died tonight, your employer would fill your role by Monday.”)

　　When society has no shared meta-story, and when we lack deep relationship ties to others, there’s no positive reinforcement to make the drudgery of work matter.

　　Because each worker’s innie and outie lack a shared purpose, they start to develop individual purposes that put them at odds with themselves, with multiple characters cheating on their outie partners with innies. This culminates in a brilliant debate between Mark and his innie over recorded messages, where his innie won’t help Mark save his wife because Mark has someone else he loves down on the Severed floor.

　　You don’t have to be a Marxist—or long for a personal connection to your shoes—for Severance’s sense of loneliness and meaninglessness to resonate. Work is largely disconnected from relationships or a larger sense of purpose. The relationships that do happen are shallow and fragile, because anyone can suddenly be gone tomorrow for reasons we may never understand. The anonymity of life allows us all to wear masks that alienate us from each other. This rise in loneliness is one of the major causes of the rise in depression, as documented by Jean Twenge in Generations and Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation.

　　No one wants to eliminate the good parts of capitalism, like the dynamic rise in living standards and the worldwide drop in poverty and childhood mortality. And alternatives like communism or socialism, which try to harness the wealth-creating powers of the Industrial Revolution, don’t solve the alienation issue. When people are gifted new income, they choose leisure activities rather than pro-social ones like community engagement or caring for others.

　　Liberal bromides against capitalism may be lacking, but conservatives also struggle to address the alienation issue. This year, a fight broke out among conservatives about jobs and a meaningful life when conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that one solution to the decline in employment and marriage is for young men, especially, to be willing to get a job at Panda Express or Chipotle. They could make $70k as an assistant manager with a path forward to $100k as a store manager. That kind of steady employment would also make them more attractive marital candidates.

　　Rufo’s suggestion set off a flurry of angry replies, with many accusing him of condemning people to a lifetime of jobs they’ll hate (who dreams of working at Panda Express forever?) rather than fixing the systemic problems that limit men’s jobs to those choices. (For instance, some complain that schools are biased in favor of girls’ learning styles, and teachers are biased in their grading against boys.) As culture critic Aaron Renn pointed out, this won’t totally solve the marriage problem either, since women are outstripping men in college degrees also, and most of those women won’t want to marry a man without one.

　　All these important points still miss the real issue. Most Americans actually have more satisfaction in their jobs than they did decades ago. But they’re still more depressed than ever. Young men are dropping out of the workforce because, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, they can’t see the point of having a job without intrinsic satisfaction. When society has no shared meta-story, and when we lack deep relationship ties to others, there’s no positive reinforcement to make the drudgery of work matter. Richard Reeves wrote about the experiences of young men in Of Boys and Men and came away believing that this lack of motivation was one of the biggest obstacles for men. When even successful men often feel like the characters of Severance, who can blame them?

　　Roger Eggers, director of The Northman and Nosferatu, once spoke with wistful envy of what it must have been like to be an artist in previous eras, when life seemed to have more intrinsic meaning.

　　I think it’s hard to do this kind of creative work in a modern secular society because it becomes all about your ego and yourself. And I am envious—this is the horrible part—I’m envious of medieval craftsmen who are doing the work for God. And that becomes a way … [for] you [to] get to be creative to celebrate something else. And also, you’re censoring yourself because it’s not about like me, me, me, me, me, me. So you say, Oh, I got to rein that back because that’s not what this altar piece needs to be. Any worldview where everything around them is full of meaning is exciting to me, because we live in such a tiresome, lame, commercial culture now.

　　What men and women need is for the pieces of their lives to be “re-integrated”—to use a Severence term. People are happiest when their stories and activities cohere into a purposeful whole. This is why people who went to church during the pandemic were the only group whose mental health went up: Religion connects people in a meta-story that connects them to real people and explains the meaning of all the parts of their lives. As Twenge playfully notes, there’s no Amish mental health crisis.

　　This is one of the reasons that Jordan Peterson has been so effective at appealing to young men. Because he’s able to take the boring stuff of life (“clean your room”) and make it an epic adventure story. “You have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”

　　We also need to connect our work lives, family lives, and social lives in some real-life way. If a young man goes to church and builds real relationships with his community there, he’ll have more people to give him practical help to get him a job, and more satisfaction in the job he gets because of the people rooting for him.

　　The truth is, the kind of meaning that Eggers envies is available in the modern world, but most people choose to walk away from it. It is like the final heartbreaking moments of Severances second season finale, where (spoilers) Mark’s innie decides to stay with his innie love rather than join his wife. He chooses his life of alienation over his life of integration.

　　As French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky wrote in Hypermodern Times, the real culprit of alienation is human freedom. The Enlightenment reformers weakened all the human institutions that bound us together to give humans maximum freedom. Religious freedom meant you could choose your church. Democracy means you choose your government. Capitalism meant you could choose your job and where you shopped. The technology and wealth that developed rapidly from this meant it was easier than ever to travel and choose your community. And what did we do with this freedom? We choose to move away from each other, to see our families only at Christmas and Easter, and to go to church less. As Jonathan Haidt points out in The Anxious Generation, once we developed social media, we used that freedom to prioritize virtual relationships over real ones.

　　We should not eliminate human freedom. Instead, we must learn to make the choices that will actually make us happy. Even though it means that other people we love—like Mark—will sometimes walk away and choose alienation instead.