Decoding Severance: TV Series

When Technology Doesn’t Scare You—You Should Be Scared

I watch television in the same way I read a book—looking for the unspoken.

At first pass, the premise of Severance is clinical: a chip implanted in your brain to separate work memories from personal ones. Two lives, no overlap. No baggage from home at the office. No burnout from work at the dinner table. Clean. Controlled. Deeply troubling.

And that’s where Severance succeeds. It doesn’t scream about the dangers of technology. It whispers about what we’re already willing to give away.

A World That Feels Uncomfortably Familiar

The office in Severance is stripped of all context. No clear purpose. No endpoint. Just terminal tasks.

And yet—somehow—it’s not dystopian, at least not in the conventional sense. There’s no surveillance drone outside the window. There’s no Overwatch. Instead, there’s a man sorting numbers he doesn’t understand. There’s a woman asking what she did to deserve a life she doesn’t remember choosing. There’s a hallway that leads to nowhere. A break room where remorse is manufactured. A wellness session that recites trivia as a substitute for intimacy.

Severance is not the future. It’s now—just with the volume turned down low enough that most people won’t hear.

True Horror

The brilliance of Severance isn’t its concept. It is its restraint. It understands that the most unsettling questions don’t need to be asked loudly in order to echo.

Who are you when no one knows the rest of you? What part of your life is still yours if it’s been cut off from your memory? Can you be held accountable for choices you didn’t know you made?

The “innies” and “outies” aren’t just clever sci-fi mechanics. They’re metaphors for how many of us live—compartmentalized, fragmented, flattened by routine.

You don’t need a brain chip to feel like a different person at work than you are at home. We’re already doing that. Severance just makes it literal.

What It Gets Right

Technology in Severance isn’t flashy. It doesn’t have to be. The chip is invisible. The architecture is sterile. The software is vague. It’s not trying to impress. It’s trying to disappear.

And that’s the point. The most dangerous technologies don’t demand attention. They quietly restructure your sense of self until you forget you ever felt whole.

I don't watch Severance thinking, "Wow, what a concept!" Instead I keep thinking, "We are already this lonely. We are already this severed." We scroll instead of speak. We optimize and streamline instead of listening and caring. We perform wellness while quietly falling apart. It’s not the chip that troubles me. It was how willing I am to accept why someone might choose it.

A Different Sort of Entertainment

Some shows entertain you. Some shows disturb you. Severance does something else: It gently asks what you’ve traded away just to make it through the week. And if you sit with that question long enough, the quiet becomes unbearable. Which is exactly the point.