Do You Like Being Alive?

Contains major spoilers from both seasons of the hit show Severance on Apple TV. Why haven't you watched it yet?

It's getting harder to have philosophical discussions with people who refuse to take my recommendation to finally binge the two seasons of Severance. I’m not simply fanboying here. The show is a brilliant launch point in dissecting so many aspects of the human condition. If you are interested in a modern exploration of the question of self—“Who are you?” are the first words uttered in the show—you’ve got to watch this series.

So I’m not going to give you an elevator pitch here, though the show prominently features elevators. I’m going to assume that if you are reading this, you watched the show. Or if you’d like, go watch the two seasons and come back here and join the discussion.

Woody Allen opened his classic movie Annie Hall with the following monologue:

“There's an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know; and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life—full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”

As a soon-to-be father, I’ve often pondered this point. What do I say to my child when, while having an especially bad day—and those happen to all of us—my child looks my wife and me in the eye and says, “Mom, Dad, why did you bring me into this world?”

I think about this because I felt exactly that way at short intervals throughout my childhood. My parents were wonderful people who traded any personal pleasure for the well-being of their children. I’m the oldest of eight. My parents were twenty and nineteen when I was born. By the time they were both thirty, they had six kids. Naturally, I felt crowded out by my younger siblings.

I also felt pretty resentful about having to go to yeshiva: Hours of chanting davening and chumash in second grade at nine in the morning while the long fluorescent light bulbs basked our classroom in an ugly yellow light. Hours of sitting at an old wooden desk waiting for recess. Being at the mercy of the pedagogical abilities of each year’s teacher. Some years I had a good rebbi and the learning was fine. Other years the rebbi sucked, and so did the entire fourteen hundred hours we had to spend with him.

But there was something good in school as well. I had friends. From age five to thirteen I spent the majority of my waking hours with the same twenty people. We argued, fought, and reconciled. We played Monopoly and baseball. We went to each other's houses for birthday parties and playdates. (No one used the word playdate back then.) We watched each other grow from snotty children to bar mitzva boys with black hats and tefillin bags.

I had very intense friendships. In the earlier years, around eight, we would argue a lot about who’s whose best friend, and who should be included and excluded from the group. In third grade, we had a real class war with me leading the charge of a band of less popular kids against my former friend, who I perceived as the un-appointed, tyrannical class king. Even though it was over in less than a week, it was a brutal war. There was bullying on the bus, physical confrontations, spies, and intrigue. Ever since, I have not been involved in something so heated. Eight years old was the peak of my political involvement—I’ve chilled out. The war only ended because my brilliant rebbi figured out what was going on. He canceled class and resolved the conflict by forcing all the opponents to play one-on-one board games with each other. As the leader of the opposition, I was forced to play against the class king. Two days later, we were all friends again. I’m forever grateful to this rebbi. If only the wars of adults could be solved so easily.

My point is that having such close friends in school really changed how I felt about it. On one hand, it still felt like a prison. You had to raise your hand to talk. You didn’t choose what to learn. You needed permission to go to the bathroom. You were punished for bad behavior. On the other hand, some of the closest people in my life were only available to me within the walls of this school. I loved my friends. Slowly I began to love my school.

Severance watchers, does this sound familiar? In the beginning of the series, it is clear to us viewers that the best thing for the innies is to get out of Lumon and never come back. Helly R keeps trying to escape. Even though she has no idea who she is on the outside, she detests her life as an innie, even attempting suicide at one point. By the end of season one, we are convinced that if only the innies can let the world know just how bad life is for them, they will be freed.

But then season two comes along and raises an interesting point. Is an innie who is forever banished from Lumon a dead innie? A funeral is held for Irving. Irving’s outie may be alive, but the innie Irving—the one who is loved by his innie friends and the one who loves Bert—seems to be gone from the other innies’ lives forever. This line of thinking is eventually adopted by Mark and Helly. Mark’s outie suffered greatly in the absence of his wife Gemma. He wants innie-Mark to help him rescue her. But innie-Mark doesn’t care about Gemma. He cares about Helly. He refuses to leave.

Watching Mark and Helly run through the hallways of Lumon in the finale of season two brought me back to my own days of running through the school hallways with my friends. Yeshiva was my Lumon. At home, my family primarily spoke Russian and my main interactions were with my brothers and sisters. Being the oldest, I was the authority on most things as long as I could get along with my mother and father. In school, I was part of a whole different world of English speakers, teachers, and most importantly friends. There was one version of me at home, and a slightly different one in school.

And then one day it ended. My group of friends all got into a “top” high school while I went off on my own to a school with a better secular studies program. Six months later, we held our only ever class reunion. Two years later, I was fully integrated into a new school and a new friend group. I stayed in touch with no one. Eight years of friendship erased, like they never existed. Since then I’ve pretty much rinsed and repeated this process several times—a solo transfer to a yeshiva in Israel, moving to a new neighborhood with my wife and making new friends here. It's not as drastic now, I keep up with some high school friends and many of the people from my yeshiva in Israel. But the elementary school friends are gone. In fact, I don't even know where many of them are.

About a year ago I contacted someone from the old days looking for a close friend's phone number. He barely remembered who I was. He thought I was calling for a donation. I had heard a rumor that my best friend from elementary school, who I remember as a good kid and very studious, had never gotten married. This was shocking to me. I started having dreams where we met up and he told me about all the colorful ways his life ended up going. I asked this guy if this was true and he said absolutely not. My former best friend is married with children and living in Lakewood. I took his number, called, and it went straight to voicemail. I never tried calling again.

As Severance demonstrates, one can have many innies. There is you as a parent. There is you as a spouse. There is you as a professional, employer, employee, shul-goer, and fun friend. Personally, I try my best to not be a two-face. I try to find unity in myself where I am basically the same person no matter what role I am expected to play in the current moment. But in reality, this isn’t true. You are in fact supposed to be someone different in every given situation. Code-switching, a term that has recently been popularized, refers to the phenomenon of slightly alternating one's speech and mannerisms to best fit a particular social situation. It’s very hard to be effective in different groups without code-switching.

As much as we want to be faithful to our real selves, one can argue that the self is actually an illusion. In fact, any system of self-help, from religious to secular, will firstly divide your personality into many parts. The conscious and the subconscious. The ego and the id. The human and animal souls. It's a never-ending list of experts trying to explain to you why you have so many conflicting voices and goals inside your head.

In fact, having watched two seasons demonstrating all the adverse effects of being severed, I’m still not fully convinced that it's an unethical procedure. Why not split the parts of your brain that don’t seem to help each other? Why would you want to know about your life outside the office when you need to be clocking in to work? The real issue with the innies is that they were being mistreated at work. The work was stupid, the punishments inhumane, and they had no friends and family. However, towards the end of season two, each of our innies is now in love with somebody.

Love can help you go through a hard time. As my father always says, if you work with good people you can do any job. Once he had good friends in school, my innie-Benyomin was happy. He ran through the halls with them. They were his entire life. Those friendships have now been dead for almost twenty years. Is he?

What a funny and obvious conclusion to my original question. It turns out, love is the answer. One feels like living when there are other human beings in your life that you want to see and spend time with and who reflect your love back to you. People often feel at their worst when their love is not reflected back to them. Being rejected romantically is one of the worst feelings of emotional pain one can feel. The other is the pain of losing a loved one. I remember crying like a baby when my grandfather died two years ago, because I understood that someone who loved me so much was now gone. It wasn’t so much that I would miss him. I still love my grandfather. But not having him here to love me back still feels like a gut punch.

I am sad for the child that I was who at moments felt unloved to the point of questioning the reason for his existence. Sometimes I hear very religious people talk about how life must have meaning to be worth living. I find that often this is said by people who aren’t experiencing love. They are emotionally distant from their partners, friends, and family. They are looking for meaning to fill the hole in their heart.

You can disagree with me, but realize that it was the Beatles who said it first: All you need is love. My childhood self eagerly ran to school just to spend time with his friends. Innies are currently fighting for their existence on the severed floor of Lumon just so they can continue to love each other.

Don’t underestimate the power of love.