“Severance” and the Illusion of Separate Selves

What the show gets right about identity, memory, and oneness

What if you could separate your work self from your home self—not by boundaries or intention, but by surgery?

That’s the premise behind Severance, the quietly unsettling series that explores what happens when memory itself is divided. At Lumon Industries, certain employees undergo a procedure that splits their consciousness between work and non-work hours. The result is two experiential identities: the “innie,” who exists only within the workplace and remembers nothing beyond it, and the “outie,” who lives the rest of the employee’s life with no memory of the office.

In the beginning, the innies identify with their outies. They’re curious about them. They appreciate Lumon’s brief therapeutic sessions in which they’re told flattering things about their outie’s life. It makes sense—they assume the outie is simply who they become once they leave the building. They don’t care about other people’s outies. They want to know about their own.

But as the show progresses and the interests of innies and outies begin to diverge, the innies stop seeing their outies as themselves. The connection erodes, and with it, the sense of shared identity. What begins as a thread of continuity becomes a rupture.

It’s an elegant horror story—but also a profound meditation on identity. And if you’re willing to look closely, Severance says something both simple and radical:

The illusion of separateness doesn’t require a new self. It only takes a break in communication.

The self is a memory loop

In Severance, there is no mystical soul-hopping or consciousness cloning. The same brain processes both sets of experiences. The same neural machinery generates all thoughts and sensations. What’s changed is only the flow of memory. The innie cannot recall anything from the outside world. The outie cannot recall anything that happens inside Lumon. And so, each version of “the person” begins to believe they are distinct. But they aren’t. Not really.

This isn’t just fiction. It reflects something very real about how we experience identity.

Neuroscientists have long understood that our sense of self is not a singular entity hidden in the brain. It’s a process—one that draws heavily on memory, narrative, and continuity. Break that continuity, and the illusion of a stable self starts to unravel.

The split-brain parallel

There’s a well-known neurological phenomenon that makes Severance look less like science fiction and more like psychological realism: split-brain syndrome.

In certain rare cases—typically to treat severe epilepsy—the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, is severed. After the surgery, patients function relatively normally. But under experimental conditions, things get strange.

Each hemisphere can perceive and respond to information independently. One side of the brain can select a picture or make a decision that the other side is unaware of. In some cases, one hand may reach for something that the other tries to stop. Each hemisphere seems to operate with its own will. And yet—importantly—there is no evidence that two subjects now exist. There is no “new self” introduced. There’s just a breakdown in information transfer.

The result? The illusion of two selves emerges from a failure of communication within the same subject.

This is very similar to what happens in Severance.

No new self required

It’s tempting to describe Helly R. and Helly E. as two different people. One hates Lumon. The other thinks the job is important. One wants out. The other doesn’t want in. But these aren’t two people. They are two memory partitions—two life histories feeding the same system under different rules of access.

If Helly E. suddenly inherited all of Helly R.’s memories, she wouldn’t say, “Ah, I see, I have a counterpart.” She would say, “Oh my god, that was me.” The same goes for Mark, Irving, Dylan. The pain, the choices, the moral weight of it all—they would land in a single place. And it wouldn’t require metaphysics to make that happen. Just memory.

The show never needs to conjure a second soul. It just severs the thread of memory. And in doing so, it shows how fragile the illusion of separateness really is.

The myth of multiplicity

We like to believe that identity is bound to agency—that each person is a singular decision-maker with a unified point of view. But what if what we call a “self” is just a bundle of memories with an internal narrator?

Take away the continuity of memory, and the sense of personal identity collapses. But the subject of experience—the thing that actually feels pain, sees light, hears sound—hasn’t gone anywhere. It simply no longer has access to its own story.

In this sense, the self is like a TV channel. Change the channel, and the storyline changes. But the screen stays the same. The field in which experience arises doesn’t fragment. It just displays a new set of information.

Oneness isn’t a belief—it’s a structure

The lesson of Severance, like the lesson of split-brain research, isn’t that we have many selves. It’s that the appearance of many selves emerges whenever information is walled off inside a unified system.

Innie experiences and outie experiences are happening to the same subject. They just don’t know it. And if their memories were reconnected, the truth would snap into place instantly.

This isn’t mysticism. It’s a different way of understanding materialism. The subject of experience doesn’t need to be multiplied across bodies and boundaries. It can be singular, distributed, and fragmented—not by metaphysics, but by memory.

We are all severed

What Severance teaches us is that our perceived separateness might be the product of bad architecture.

We aren’t separate because we were born as distinct beings. We’re separate because we’re operating under informational partitions. The brain does this by design. So does culture. So does language.

But what if those partitions dropped? What if the walls came down? What if the memories—yours, mine, and everyone else’s—were revealed to have always been happening to the same experiencer?

Maybe the self was never more than a working model. Maybe the outie was always the innie. Maybe we are not many minds at all, but many windows into the same field.

Conclusion: One subject, many lives

Severance doesn’t try to explain consciousness. It just shows us how easily the illusion of multiplicity arises from a breach in continuity. And it does so without adding mysticism, fantasy, or metaphysical hand-waving.

There’s no need for soul duplication. No need for a new identity every time you forget. The subject remains. And perhaps that’s what we all are—one subject, partitioned by circumstance, looking out through many eyes.

May 29, 2025