Is ignorance bliss? This is one of the questions posed by Severance, the Apple TV+ show created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller. If you’re unfamiliar, the show revolves around a mysterious company called Lumon; Lumon has developed a novel medical procedure known as ‘severance’, which enables people to split their professional (“innie”) and personal (“outie”) identities via a microchip inserted into their brains. While in the office – the chip is (usually) activated in the lift down to the eerie, labyrinthine severed floor – severed employees are unable to recollect even the most basic details about their lives outside of work; as “outies” in the real world, they’re clueless about what it is they do nine-to-five.

Why would anyone elect to be severed? For protagonist Mark S (Adam Scott), it’s the only way he can cope with the grief of losing his wife, Gemma. In season one’s finale – probably one of the greatest episodes of television of the 21st century so far – the innies working on Lumon’s ‘macrodata refinement’ team revolt and activate their chips while outside the office. Mark takes this opportunity to ask his sister Devon about why his outie chose to be severed in the first place: “You lost your wife,” she explains. “You tried to go back to teaching three weeks after she died, and it was a disaster [...] I guess you thought the severed job would… He hoped you’d be spared from the pain.”

We see the stark contrast between outie Mark and innie Mark in the show’s pilot episode. While outie Mark sobs uncontrollably in his car before work, his mood shifts instantly after descending to the severed floor and becoming his innie. His outie has the characteristically sluggish gait of a depressive; his innie practically skips to his desk. His outie keeps tissues on hand to stem floods of tears; his innie, finding a crumpled tissue in his pocket, smiles to himself as he casts it into the bin. They present as two entirely different people: one depressed and dependent on alcohol, the other good-humoured and jocular.

Severance is often described as a dystopian work of science fiction, but there are stark similarities between the show’s world and our own. While it’s not possible to literally bifurcate your consciousness – yet – how many of us contain parts of our identities just to get through the day? How many of us have gone to work while depressed, brokenhearted or grieving? On a macro level: how many of us have gone to work knowing that wars, famines, and genocides are happening? Arguably, under late capitalism – which prioritises work over all else – we’re all kind of severed.

It’s partly a psychological survival strategy; compartmentalisation is a very common trauma response. Our brains can only handle so much. But it’s fair to say we feel considerable pressure to compartmentalise in the first place because society isn’t structured in a way which allows people to look at trauma head-on. Why is it that Mark must return to work three weeks after Gemma’s death, when a steady return to normal functioning after a bereavement can typically take two or more years? The need for him to be productive and keep working is so urgent, so imperative, that he allows his employer to stick a microchip in his brain. But Severance does not condone severance: Lumon uses the innies’ ignorance to exploit them in a number of innovatively cruel and evil ways. Instead, it emphatically skewers the ridiculousness of modern life, where productivity (and appearing sane) always takes precedence over personal pain.

Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-nominated A Real Pain explores similar themes on a more macro level. The film follows cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) as they embark on a Jewish history tour through Poland in honour of their late grandmother. David is straight-laced and pragmatic; Benji is much more emotionally volatile. But for all Benji’s instability, at times he appears to be one of the only characters who truly feels the horror of the Holocaust. In one memorable scene, he points out an uncomfortable truth: the tour group is sitting in the first-class carriage of a train heading for Lublin while their ancestors were “herded into the backs of these fucking things like cattle”.

But nobody wants to hear it. Dave tells him to be quiet because his observation is “depressing”. Another member of the tour, Mark, flippantly remarks that he doesn’t understand why he should feel guilty for enjoying the tour. This tips Benji over the edge. “Because our lives are so pampered and privileged,” he spits. “We completely cut ourselves off from anyone else’s true pain.” When Mark questions what he’s supposed to do about that, Benji hits the roof. “Fucking acknowledge it, man! Try to feel it in some way!” Benji is depicted as a little bit mad – but equally the film suggests that perhaps in some circumstances madness is the only sane response.

Plus, as Benji implies, one person’s comfort can often come at the expense of another person’s pain. Severance delves into this in the show’s most recent episode, “Chikhai Bardo”. It turns out that Mark’s wife Gemma is alive and being used by Lumon as some sort of guinea pig; she spends her days on the company’s ‘testing floor’, ferried between different rooms which activate her severance chip. One room is a dentist’s office; another simulates a turbulent plane; a third is a mocked-up living room where Gemma is forced to write a stack of thank you cards for inane Christmas gifts. It’s implied Lumon is attempting to develop and subsequently market the chip as a means of eliminating suffering from life entirely (this is still just a theory, but it chimes with a lot of what we already know: that the chip is available for women who wish to be spared the pain of childbirth; the Eagan family’s wealth derived from the manufacture of ether, an early anaesthetic; etc).

But while Gemma’s outie is able to lead a painless life, by contrast, her ‘innies’ experience nothing but pain and suffering. What’s more, their suffering still permeates the body they share with Gemma’s outie: her jaw still hurts after her time in the dentist room; her hand aches after writing the cards. The show remains hugely sceptical of the idea that you can swerve suffering entirely. As Mark’s colleague Petey says in season one: “You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is”.

These ideas about the value of suffering and the importance of empathy feel particularly pertinent today. Take Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who is alleged to have shot and killed United Health CEO Brian Thompson. It was an act of extreme violence, but – as Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker shortly after the killing – there are many other kinds of violence. Some of it is structural; less direct, but infinitely more destructive. For example, it’s estimated 68,000 Americans die every year because they lack access to healthcare, while Thompson’s company reported a $400 billion in revenue for 2024. “Structural violence is simply, at this point, the structure of American life,” wrote Tolentino, “and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not.” Mangione, it seems, understood the horror of this. And his actions have opened others’ eyes: there was a marked lack of sympathy for Thompson in the wake of his murder.

So did Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US soldier who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC in February 2024. Bushnell felt compelled to do this having reckoned with the horrifying reality of living through a genocide (to date, over 60,000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza). Writing in the Guardian, Moira Donegan called out the cognitive dissonance of those who speculated about his mental wellbeing in the wake of his death: “‘Who but an insane person would do such a thing?’ some wonder; as if this question could not be asked of Israel’s war itself”. Bushnell’s self-sacrifice was extreme, but he saw himself as responding to Israel’s extremity. As he said himself moments before his death: “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

How can we reckon with all the abjection that permeates the world when capitalism tries to preclude us from doing that? While this is difficult, it’s not impossible. The actions of Mangione and Bushnell and subsequent public reactions suggest that, cheeringly, many of us are not content to let rank injustice become ambient background noise. The November before Bushnell died, he texted a friend some of his thoughts on the importance of acknowledging suffering: “all of the pain you have locked away senses an opportunity to be processed and comes knocking [...] your pain refuses to go away and calcifies into a heavy weight you experience as shame.” Shame, as Bushnell recognised, is a productive, healthy emotion (just look at the US for a pertinent example of how shamelessness begets ruin). It’s daunting, sure, to wrap your head around the scale of our problems – which include horrors like extreme inequality, mass surveillance, criminalisation of protest, climate catastrophe, and genocide. Facing up to these crises can feel like descending into madness. But we can only become better people and imagine a better world by first understanding what it is we need to change.