My long-distance boyfriend and I have come to look forward to “Severance Thursdays” with great excitement, eagerly anticipating the new episodes of the Apple TV+ mystery-box thriller on Discord together at 6 p.m. PST. In case you’re not of similar Thursday night devotion, the show’s premise revolves around four “severed” employees working for a mysterious supercorporation, Lumon, whose memories and spatial experiences are divided into their “work” and “personal” selves — essentially the second they clock in, they become an entirely different person whose life exists solely of work.
The storyline has been considered philosophically twisted and critically acclaimed. Most people would initially agree that, yes, they’d love to experience a life where work is merely skipped over, but the concept of creating a version of yourself that knows nothing but work, that can’t exist without work, feels morally wrong. The show felt like an amusing, morbid, wake-up call, particularly at the University of California, Berkeley, where the severance procedure almost feels like something a startup tabling on Sproul Plaza would patent — and a number of students would, I’m sure, at least consider it.
The more I thought about the basic premise of the show, the more hauntingly familiar it became to me: a version of yourself that can’t exist without work.
Work, in its essence – studying, writing, internship-applying, networking, and the actual responsibilities of my paid part-time job – swallows up an incredible portion of my life and a great deal of my time. It’s not as if I’m not passionate about what I learn and what I want to do; writing and literature in all their forms have been my lifeblood for as long as I can remember in my life. But if I were to extract this “work” part from my greater self, I’m not sure who I’d be.
I’m not sure who I’d identify myself as, how I’d mark my achievements or interests, how I’d place value in myself as a person. Work brings a sense of unity between me and my peers, gives me a sense of belonging at my school, gives me purpose and passion to submit every cover letter and resume. But the knowledge that it’s completed, that it’s done, leaves me with the ability to watch television shows and cook and listen to jazz music and read recreationally (for once) in peace.
Could I still enjoy these things without that? Perhaps. I could be a person who cooks and reads without the pressure of the endless hustle. But what would I be? What would I live for? There is something addictive about the validation and compensation achieved from work, an almost mathematical equation — all these steps, all these cover letters and networking meetings and career trajectory studies — will probably lead to success. Hopefully. Most Likely. Perhaps. But don’t you want to climb the ladder? Don’t you want to be the best?
However, a different perspective approaches me: with the exception of my scholarly work, I haven’t written anything narrative or literarily in a very long time, but I have written social media captions, press releases, and articles on a regular basis with the belief that having full-time careers doing any of these things will help support my passion doing the thing I actually want to be doing but still, currently, never have the time to do. Which isn’t an equation that really makes sense.
Not to say I don’t enjoy the social media caption or press release or article writing – I definitely do. Would I necessarily protest at being severed (ethical qualms aside) in order to leave more time for my studies and passions? Maybe not as hard as I hope I would. But this world, as Lumon recognized, doesn’t reward studies or passions, doesn’t give affirmation or validation or compensation that every human being yearns for internally. If one could be compensated simply for doing essentially nothing, wouldn’t a person be remiss to not take that route?
If I were to remove my “work self” from myself, I wouldn’t know who I am. My work self is so deeply entrenched and ingrained in me that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, having no profitable passion (not outrightly or easily anyway) that would bring me similar success. But you could say I have been successfully corporatized enough to associate profit with success, and in that context, perhaps the procedure of Severance may be potentially and personally quite freeing.
How dangerous is it that we live in such a world where dystopian rhetoric is so close at hand, so easy to reason yourself into, and so palpably close to becoming a reality on those damned consulting tables on Sproul Plaza? If only for the sake of the work-crazed students that so desperately need it.