My daughter recently underwent a lengthy hospital stay (which you can read more about here). She moved through different departments—the ICU, the Cardiovascular ICU, the Pulmonary Critical Care Unit, and more. With multiple health issues, she was visited by numerous doctors, each specializing in a specific field.

Each doctor could only comment on their area of expertise. Again and again, we heard:
“I can’t comment on that because I’m not a lung doctor.”
“I’m not sure what’s going on there because I’m not a heart doctor.”

As her stay lengthened, it started to feel like she was slipping through the cracks. No one seemed to look at her case as a whole. Instead, she was assigned a specialist for each individual part.

To be clear, I’m grateful for the care she received and know that it saved her life. This is simply how modern medicine functions—and it has its use. But a bigger story is at play. This is how modern medicine operates because this is also how modern life is lived.

A Fragmented World

Our lives today are divided into isolated fragments—separated, chopped, severed. They told us that we must understand reality like a dictionary or an encyclopedia instead of a story or a heritage.

But to start with, our bodies don’t really work that way. The human body is an interconnected system, each part dependent on the others—hence the rising popularity of holistic medicine.

And nothing else in life truly works that way, either. Yet, it is incredibly difficult to see just how deep this cultural fragmentation runs. It’s hard to see your own eyeballs. A truly powerful story holds up a mirror and forces us to recognize ourselves.

The Apple TV+ series Severance gives us a rare glimpse of who we have become.

Our Severed Lives

Severance is a psychological thriller on Apple TV+ that follows employees of Lumon Industries, a mysterious corporation that uses a controversial medical procedure to separate workers’ memories of their personal and professional lives.

Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) is one such employee struggling with the eerie consequences of this enforced work-life balance. The procedure creates two versions of the same person—an “innie” and an “outie.”

• The innie is the employee at Lumon, confined to an office with fluorescent lighting, enduring an endless workday with no memory of the outside world.

• The outie lives life outside of work, with no recollection of their time in the office.

For the innie, life is a never-ending workday. They have no conscious memory of going home, eating, sleeping, staying up late, drinking too much, crying, or gathering with friends.

And yet, they can feel it. They are haunted by the life of their outie. They carry at all times a permanent, nameless ache.

This is an incredibly profound picture of what it means to live fragmented lives. Though Severance is dramatized—almost cartoonishly at times—it sometimes takes this kind of distorted perspective to offer a fleeting glimpse of the truth.

In one scene from Season One, Mark’s outie visits his sister, her husband, and a few friends for “dinner”—except there is no food. They sit at a bare table and instead “eat” talk.

It’s the entire show in miniature from another angle. Even food—one of the most fundamental aspects of human connection—has been severed from fellowship and community.

How We Eat Reflects How We Live

The way we eat speaks volumes about our culture. The rise of fast food restaurants, where meals are deposited through windows and consumed on the go, paints a stark contrast to what food historically meant.

Worse still, many families today routinely place individual DoorDash orders and eat in isolation—each person consuming their Buffalo wings alone while streaming their own personal Netflix channel.

The Architecture of Isolation

Fragmentation has also shaped our built environment. For the first time in history, we have literally divided every aspect of how we live.

In The God of the Garden, Andrew Peterson describes the drastic transformation that came with the rise of suburbia:

“I have come to think of subdivisions as no places. They are communities with no commerce. Sidewalks that lead to no real destination. Townless clusters of houses and more houses, places without place…

Somewhere along the way, someone had the idea to create neighborhoods out of thin air. Make all the houses more or less the same, zone them so there was no town or city life within walking distance, and market them as the culmination of the good life. We’ve put the parks a few miles over there, the shopping a few miles over that way, work way over yonder, trusting that cars would get us where we needed to go.”

The result? Everything in our modern lives is classified and divided up.

A Lost Architectural Language

My husband recently took a class on Medieval Italian architecture. He learned that not only were Italian towns and villages planned around community life, but even the buildings themselves spoke a common language, each in harmony with the other.

In describing this, he wrote a paper stating:

“How did these buildings talk? An entire vocabulary was created that could communicate the relative importance or function of a building compared to those around it… [The] small piazza was a simple yet clear example of Alberti’s vision of a city: a collection of buildings and open spaces consciously designed and related to one another.

Or you could say that all the various buildings, though having different functions, designers, and appearances, all spoke the same language.

A clear, orderly, lovely, and sensible architectural language seems to be all but gone. Most modern cities lack a common architectural tongue. Developers all speak different dialects, with the only common thread being earning potential. The result is visual confusion and a scattered feeling as we navigate through our modern Western cities.”

Peterson likewise contrasts our fragmented modern lives with European villages, where homes, the town, and the local pub were all within walking distance—where footpaths across the countryside led neighbors to one another and nature. Life was lived in harmonious community.

We need Places with a capital P—places that honor community history, the sacredness of creation, and our basic human need for beauty and nature.

Yet, as James Howard Kunstler warns, we have become a “country of no places.”

—Andrew Peterson

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Severance might be a wake-up call.

Our modern lives, much like Mark’s innie in Severance, are haunted by a nameless sense of loss. The series shows us that:

• You can have a home without a place.

• A body without an identity.

• Expertise without wisdom.

• Academia without understanding.

Life is not a collection of severed, random parts. It is a story, a heritage, a history, and a community.

How do we put the pieces back together? Start by recognizing what’s lost and then fight to raise a coming generation that builds something new—so new that it’s old.