In Severance, the personal and working lives of the characters are physically bifurcated to the point that they can’t even communicate. A literal personality split with no way to reconcile the two. I think they do the actual degree of severance we have in our lives an injustice. They’re understating it. I think you lead way more lives than just your personal and professional ones.
We have this idea called ‘integrity’. That is, the parts of ourselves we express cohere to some sort of core that is you. It goes beyond lying indiscriminately - our actions, even in our solitary moments, are expressions of who we are. The thought that our selves could be splintered leaves us feeling fragmented and disconnected, our actions scattered about reality without any kind of centrifuge holding them together. We’re just going through the motions, responding to urges we don’t really understand and promulgated by a technological complex who’s reach and sophistication is compounding.
Complicating this, each of us now live with a digital portal that allows us - any part of us - to teleport anywhere we please without anyone knowing. In fact, we’re now leading more lives than ever, to our tremendous opportunity and detriment.
Abundance
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
- From “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
This multitude of lives are made possible through abundance. One of the gifts of progress is an accelerating sense of connection. In many ways, technology is defined by its ability to better connect. The printing press connected information with more people: the motorcar shortened the distance between places and people: the internet connected everyone with everything. Even less obvious inventions, like musical instruments, have a connecting function. They let their players connect thoughts and feelings with sound, and music has a way of connecting us both as a group and to something more numinous.
One of the things that technology and the abundance of products and cultures that free market capitalism produces is what I’ve called lives. Here, I don’t mean life as your remembered history, but the particular form of expression you choose for a part of yourself. Lives are not just your history; it’s your present and future bearing. It’s what you’re doing right now, and the teeming multitude of ways you could be from this juncture. It’s a mode of being in perpetual motion.
In this way, being a parent is a particular life, as is your job, but could also be your enduring love for Victorian literature, your penchant for a cup of Earl Grey in the early afternoon, a regular nap you cherish at 5pm, or the group of swimmers you join at dawn every day. It’s not the remembered self; it’s the connection between who you think you are and how you behave. There have always been countless ways to act out a life, all mediated through familiar structures like language and culture, throughout human history. It’s just that now you’re likely to have 5+ careers, travel to more countries, and know more stuff than any human throughout history. More lives.
In fact, one of the things abundance has brought us is a dawning recognition of just how utterly, spectacularly varied life truly is. Our opportunity is to express a core, integrated self across many different lives. All of these possible lives are, of course, part of your remembered history. They are all splinters of an imagined whole - you.
Fractured, Splintered
Arriving in the United States at the age of 18, Christian Gerhartsreiter found a sudden power through the stories he told others. Well before he was suspected of kidnapping and murder, Gerhartsreiter travelled the United States under a colorful range of identities, including a producer, actor, and most spectacularly, Clark Rockefeller (of Rockefeller family fame), which he used to marry a wealthy businesswoman.
Gerhartsreiter was comfortable shedding his skin for different situations. Human beings actually do this all the time. It’s called code-switching, or the myriad ways we respond to social cues and expectations. Often, it’s entirely appropriate and benign; being a professional, for example, often means hiding our childish impulses in order to create a goal-oriented environment. In other cases, like Gerhartsreiter, it’s more insidious; we change who we are to flex a darker impulse, or respond to forces that coerce us into something inauthentic and painful.
This pain stems from a strong drive every human has toward what we’ve called integrity. Usually, when we hear the word ‘integrity’ we think of a kind of honesty and trust we have in someone. While these are essential, I think of integrity as the human drive toward cohesion and self-understanding - to use the language of system theory, we tend toward hierarchies of greater unity. For example, in developmental psychology, Stanley Kohlberg posits that children begin life with a narcissistic understanding of the world (“pre-developmental morality”), before they grow to understand the viewpoints of others (“conventional morality”) and finally making moral choices based on universal ethics (“postconventional morality”). In the moral domain, as with many others, we seek higher principals to organise ourselves with. We are always seeking for greater wholeness.
The opposite of integrity is splintering. When we read stories like Gerhartsreiter’s we understandably think of his victims, and we should. The greatest deception, though, was to himself. I wonder what the young man was fleeing when he left Western Germany, and what sprouted that first lie upon arriving in the United States - that he was a wealthy foreign exchange student to win the favor of a potential host - but also that his father was a house painter - or an industrialist. Only later was it revealed he was a mediocre student. Maybe he lied because he was ashamed.
There was no cohesive plan apparent in Gerhartsreiter’s deceptions. All his identities - all his lives - were invented for a specific function, a response he didn’t understand very well, otherwise his end wouldn’t have been so sticky; kidnapping his daughter in broad daylight, and trying to hide out in Baltimore five days later by pretending to be a sea captain visiting from Chile. In the end, he had nothing else but to try and get his daughter - the only thing he still cared about - and sank in the quicksand he’d poured around his ankles. Such is the life organised around nothing, peeling away like mouldy banana skin.
What an enormous diffusion of energy spent on spinning plates. I can’t help but feel sorry for Gerhartsreiter because there was never any chance that all his lives, all his lying, all his identities would ever meet or make sense to him. We know from his German school transcript that, aside from being a mediocre student, he was “interested in many facets of life.”
Aren’t we all?
Diffuse Purpose
And so the dilemma: we live in a world with a superabundance of lives available to us, and yet exist with a need to lead lives that integrate with a sense of wholeness. We might not lead such disconnected lives as Gerhartsreiter, but we’re at risk of an overextension, of running in too many directions at once. It’s only natural. There are infinite worlds available in your pocket, so many playgrounds in which to frolick, the spirit deadens just realising how many you’ll miss.
This dialectic between the drive toward authenticity and wholeness on the one hand, and relentless novelty in tighter and tighter feedback loops on the other, is the tension Guo Yuheng explores in her painting I Kissed a Sea Snail via an LCD. Described as an ‘ode to these myriad identities that exist both online and offline’, the lurid color and perspicuous attention to detail reveal the chaos of this very modern problem. One sees erotic figures sliced into pieces, slot machines jostling with calls for authenticity, all framed by three cameras emerging out of pixellated chaos, lenses over lenses reflecting the fractured refraction of reactions reacting to reactions. One loses oneself trying to figure out who Yuheng is painting. The authentic self is hidden by swarms of lives jostling for attention.
There’s nothing you can do about the existence of this tension. It will probably get worse. I remember the one and only time I downloaded TikTok, realising forty minutes later I’d done nothing but nudge increasingly interesting videos, one over the other, for forty minutes. We call it doomscrolling for a reason; it’s grossly compelling, and the marketplace and accelerating improvement of technology will ensure all the ways you interface with your lives will be too. AI, it appears, is set to act as your gatekeeper into these worlds. Expect technology to demand broad, shallow engagement. Expect to be pulled in many directions, and expect to feel exhausted.
Yet I also predict a counter-movement to the seduction of splintering. Often, when a neophate joins an contemplative circle, there’s a profound moment of disconnection when meditation reveals how disjointed reality truly is. The illusoriness of the ego yanks the rug out from under them, and there’s a sensation of falling and meaninglessness. In many ways, we are Gerhartsreiter - living out more lives than we care to count. So why will we volunteer ourselves for a deeper rather than shallower life? Because you, my friend, grow by finding higher-order principals to organise your life around. They help you hang together. You seek novelty and depth.
The neophate starts to fall and panics. Then they realise it’s ok; there’s nowhere to land. One simply falls.
