Apple TV’s show Severance has recently returned for its second season, and this seemed like a great time to write a longer and shorter piece, taking a look at that show and how it relates to work as we experience it on a daily basis.
I have not watched any of Season 2 yet, so there will be no spoilers for the upcoming season, but there will be a few spoilers for Season 1, be warned. (Although I have tried to keep them to a minimum)
The premise of severance is that a corporation, Lumon, has created a technology that allows employees who choose to be severed. That is, they can completely separate their work lives from their non-work lives.
A chip is inserted into the employee’s brains such that when they enter the office, they transform from their outtie, the person that exists outside of work and has all their memories of a full life, into their innie. This person has no memory or awareness of anything outside of work.
As season one begins, a new employee, Hellie1, wakes up after the severance procedure and is born as an innie. They do not want to be there and try to escape, but their outie keeps pushing them back in.
Ultimately, the innie and the outtie can communicate via video messages, but the outtie is in charge and can decide that the innie must stay employed.
What is most interesting about this show is that it is a version of our present times (with a slight Sci-Fi adjustment) that allows us to see various aspects of work from a different lens. Specifically, I want to look at how this can shift how we think about our work-life balance and the contemporary notion that we should bring our whole selves to work.
The Work-Life Balance
One holy grail of modern working seems to be trying to achieve the mythical work-life balance, where some amount of time is dedicated to work. Still, when you leave, you can flip a switch and no longer be connected to worry about anything work-related. You would achieve a balance where you can have and enjoy your life, and work pays the bills and gives some degree of meaning to the hours you spend there.
In some ways, this is the promise of severance. Severed employees leave work entirely at work and don’t bring any of their non-work challenges into work. They achieve what might be called balance in the illusion of separation.
This separation can serve many purposes.
Work as Escape
One of the main characters in the show, Mark S., chose to be severed when his wife died. He found himself unable to continue teaching and thought that being severed would be a solution. It would give him 8 hours a day of solace where he didn’t need to think about losing his wife, and he would be able to work.
One of Mark’s colleagues, Petey, integrates (becomes un-severed) and meets outside Mark and explains that even when he is at work, it is clear that Mark is sad; it just isn’t clear why. The innie hadn’t lost the sadness or the feeling of loss; he had just been unable to understand it. And it shows how our life creeps into work even when we try to escape it.
When we see work as an escape from life, it allows us to segment ourselves away from what we are doing, but in another way, the escape into work becomes our life.
Work as life
We see this aspect in Severance as well. Each employee has a group photo of the team on their desk (there are four of them). They have a melon party to celebrate Hellie’s arrival. In a way, all the innies have is each other, because they have no life outside of work, their only friends are their work colleagues. One employee even begins to forge a romantic relationship with another department employee.
For many people, working long hours, work becomes their social life. We work long hours, and the people we see most frequently are our work colleagues, and that becomes our life. It is where people make friends, find partners, and enjoy their time.
Part of what causes us to lose the work-life balance is not just that we work all the time, but all other aspects of life are attached to work.
As Jason Read says when discussing the show:
This is something that most critics of work overlook that in an increasingly atomized and mobile society work is for many people their social life. Work is portrayed as a place of friendships and frustrations, an entire world of social relations that is often desirable because, for all of its pains and boredom, there are at least other people, and, if you meet the right productivity goals, there are finger traps and waffle parties. 2
The small joys
One of the series’s most humorous scenes is when a music party is used to lighten the mood and improve morale. The characters eat and dance to some music. With an ofice of four people (plus Mr. X the security ) The scene is quite absurd. In fact, all of the “benefits” that the innies can earn are rather absurd. The waffle party consists of eating a waffle in a replica of the founder’s house and afterward watching an absurd masked dance performance, finger traps. These rewards are exciting to the innies, but only because of the context, stripped out of real life with no notion of anything beyond their job, any break from the norm is seen as good.
The highest benefit a wellness session consists of someone reading positive traits about the outtie of the character.
What the characters really want to understand is why they are there, who their outtie really is and what are they doing, they really want to understand who they are and instead they are given trite gadgets.
We often hear that people at work want recognition, which is what the innies receive in Severance. The outies are the ones who are paid the salary. They are the ones that reap the material rewards of working. And so the innies are rewarded with erasers, parties, and (perhaps a bit too perfectly) finger traps.
These items bring joy, but as Jason Read accurately posits:
It is because work is not a total hell in some theological sense, a place of total and complete horror, that it becomes our living hell. 3
Bring your whole self to work
Another common theme in modern work parlance is that we should bring our whole selves to work. Severance is the opposite of that; nothing about the outside world is brought into work. At least not explicitly.
Authenticity
One common way this is talked about, especially for leaders, is with the idea of authenticity. I recently saw a well-known leadership program that said:
“As leaders, we must ask: Are we truly showing up authentically, or are we presenting a filtered version of ourselves?”
In Severance, this raises the of which self is the authentic one. With all memories of the outie gone, is the innie still the full real self coming to work? In some ways, this is the most cynical interpretation of “bring your whole self to work”: while you are at work, commit to it fully with your whole being, but don’t bring your baggage to work. In other words, feel free to fully embrace the experience of work from the perspective of who you are, just don’t bring the challenges and stresses of the world outside with you.
Isn’t this what the innies are doing? In some ways, it is impossible to know. Who are we without our memories and day-to-day experiences? Who would we be if we were born on our first day of work and had only ever experienced the office?
Even in Severance, it seems it is also impossible to know. The outside world does seep in. At one point, Mark encounters an ex-colleague, Petey, who has managed to integrate (merge his innie and outie memories after leaving Lumon). Petey informs Mark that he didn’t leave his sadness outside of work. It was still there. Petey could tell Mark was still sad, but it was an empty space that the innie version of Mark couldn’t understand. The pain was still there; he just couldn’t recognize it.
Similarly, Irving occasionally doses off at his desk and has visions of something dark; we later see that these dreams are connected to his outside.
And so, even if we try to prevent bringing our whole selves to work, parts of it can seep in. However, as it is shown, specifically for Irving, this is something that Lumon tries to resolve so he can get back to work. No one ever talks about these things that creep in from the outside. And isn’t that what various wellness programs at work do? Get people to be as productive as possible and minimize the impact of any outside (and even inside) stress.
Alienation
The idea of bringing your whole self to work is, in a way, a push against alienation.
There are two aspects of alienation that Severance seems to be dealing with. In the first, people become alienated from themselves.
People work for two primary reasons: for a sense of meaning and purpose and to secure the means of survival. And it is this second reason that is highlighted as a cause of alienation in Severance.
In some ways, the most paradoxical of freedoms is that you can sell your freedom to someone else and, for a period of time, as an employee, give up your freedom. And whether we are explicit about it or not, this is something we all do when we go to work. We give up most of the freedoms and rights we enjoy in a democratic country when we work at our jobs. And for the hours we are working, we are theirs. Our ability to work then becomes a commodity that can be purchased the same way that you might buy socks. However, the nature of work tends to obfuscate this. Severance makes it abundantly clear by showing the person who is selling the labor (the outie) and the labor sold/commodity (the innie) as two truly distinct individuals. And when one innie (Hellie) tries to rebel and escape by extreme means, she ends up right back at work.
We become alienated from who we really are, our “whole self” at work, from this process of selling our labor as a commodity. In this way, we are split between the person who has made a decision to sell our laborer and the laborer themselves.
The other aspect of alienation that is present is alienation from the work itself. If you worked as a cobbler making shoes, you had a direct relationship to the end product. You felt connected to it. Modern work is broken down into tasks and the result is that people lost the connection to work that they were doing.
Interestingly, even the innies don’t actually know what they do. The Macro Data group, which is the series’ focus, finds numbers on a screen of numbers that “feel” a certain way, and they sort those numbers. They speculate what is behind those numbers and what they are really doing.
In fact, all of Lumon’s severed floor is a mystery.
While modern companies all have very visible missions, purposes, and why statements, at the end of the day, it is often rare for the day-to-day work to connect back to them. And often, while it may feel like you are helping with an important mission, when looked at more closely, the primary mission is revenue for the company.
It is useful to note that this idea of work as alienating is rarely acknowledged as such in the business world itself but has had an impact on how those businesses relate to their employees. As a result, contemporary work has caused us to go to an extreme where instead of our work selves being alienated from our true selves, we try to find our true selves through work. As Jason Read has written,
”The critique of the alienating effects of labor has led to various attempts to transform the workplace, not by establishing worker control but by infusing work with activities meant to be fun and engaging. The influential responses to alienation are to be found not in the debates about work and human nature in philosophy, but in the way in which work, at least in some fields, has been restructured to offer different sorts of engagement. Moreover, the more people live their social lives in and through work, the more work is transformed from an alienation of human beings from human beings to the only social contact, the only social life some have. It is not alienation that we see in contemporary work but, more often than not, motivation, a desire to realize oneself in and through employment.” 4
Is integration possible?
One of the drivers of the action in the series is the character of Petey, who has become integrated but it isn’t going well. He has nightmares and flashbacks and is having a difficult time adjusting to his new reality.
The question it raises is whether we can ever truly integrate who we are at work and outside of it.
As mentioned in the Read quote above, one pathway is the idea that our work selves become our whole selves. And we all know people like this. I recently chatted with a Senior Leader who was leaving his high-pressure role, and he was unsure what to do without a job. “All I did was work,” he told me, “I don’t know what to do now.”
This idea is hinted at at the end of season 1; the innies want to know more about their outie selves, and they want the outies to understand what it is like on the inside. They are trying to integrate, but the innies, not the outies, are leading the drive to integration, giving primacy to the innies.
What does this mean for a middle manager?
The role of management in Severance is one of control. In fact, the only way the situation can hold is via strict control and protocols so that outies are unable to connect with other outies. As a manager, it is useful to think about the roles you are asked to play to maintain the status quo. And how it interacts with the ideas of Work-Life balance and bringing your whole self to work.
- As a manager, how are you helping support the work-life balance by understanding what each unique person needs from work?
- How are you allowing people to work with alienation in work and bringing that which is not discussable?
- Her name is perhaps an obvious indicator that being Severed is (at least for the innie) Hell. ↩
- http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/04/gonna-leave-you-all-severed-initial.html?m=1 ↩
- http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/04/gonna-leave-you-all-severed-initial.html?m=1 ↩
- Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work ↩