The Free Press
Reviews have been pouring in for the second season of Severance: “weird,” “too weird?,” and “even weirder than the first.” The darkly satirical and extremely popular series finally returned to Apple TV+ last week, three years after it became one of the buzziest shows to debut on the platform. It’s a peculiar mix of sci-fi and psychodrama, but weird as it may be, what makes Severance compelling is that any American who has had a job can relate to it, at least a little.
Severance is about severance—a fictional procedure whereby corporate employees receive a brain implant that completely separates their work memories from their personal memories. The result is two distinct consciousnesses sharing the same body: the “innie,” who only wakes up when the host body is inside the office, and the “outie,” who lives a full and vibrant life in the real world, using the money earned by their workplace self. Innies and outies are aware of each other’s existence, but they can never directly interact and have no knowledge of each other’s experiences—an innie might show up to work with a headache, and wonder if their outie got drunk the night before. Basically, severance is the world’s most ironclad NDA, with a side of split personality disorder.
And since the very first episode premiered in 2022, people have been asking themselves and each other the obvious question: Given the option, would you undergo severance?
Seriously. Imagine renting your unconscious body to a corporation for 40 hours per week, and, in return, enjoying a comfortable salary, full benefits, and the untroubled psyche of a person who has never known the degradation of human resources’ compliance training icebreaker sessions, nor written an email that uses the word “ask” as a noun.
The compulsive watchability of Severance stems from its ability to tap into the deep well of dissatisfaction that lurks beneath the surface of American corporate life. The show is a fun-house mirror version of a normal workplace: sterile, contrived, layered with absurd formalities. The innies work for a company called Lumon, in an office that is a nightmarish space of surreal minimalism, an endless maze of white hallways, glass conference rooms, anonymous doors. Their workstation is a single corporate modernist cubicle, four desks like a life raft surrounded by an endless sea of gray carpet and bare walls.
It’s a world that is ugly and cultish and isolating, but perhaps most importantly, it’s a world without meaning. Neither the outies nor the innies have any idea what Lumon does; they also have no idea what they do for Lumon. Innies spend their days “refining data”—which is to say, sifting through numbers—without ever knowing where the numbers come from, or where they go, or what they represent. In return, they receive bizarre, infantilizing prizes for reaching certain benchmarks—novelty finger traps, erasers, a rolling bar featuring a buffet of melon balls or deviled eggs. The innies have also learned not to ask questions about any of this: It’s understood not just that their invisible, voiceless corporate overlords will never respond, but that the answers wouldn’t be satisfying.
If some of the details of this world are decidedly surreal, the overall vibe is too real. The nature of modern life is that an awful lot of Americans spend the bulk of our waking hours toiling away at a job that we know, deep down, means nothing—or very little, at least. So many of our days are spent immersed in an interminable cacophony of emails, action items, Excel spreadsheets, deliverables—all of it utterly soulless, all of it devoid of discernible purpose.
That so much white-collar work is superfluous-verging-on-soul-killing has been an object of cultural interest for decades. In 1999, the movie Office Space depicted a group of disgruntled employees dragging their office printer into an open field and beating it to pieces with a baseball bat. In 2018, David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs finally put a name to the scourge of, well, bullshit jobs, “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”
More recently, American politics has caught up. The incoming Trump administration’s promise to unleash a tidal wave of layoffs, via the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, revealed a burgeoning populist sense that the people who hold these jobs are as useless as the positions themselves. On social media, there is a growing awareness of how psychologically harrowing it is to feel like a useless cog in a useless machine, particularly for a generation raised on the idea that work should be fulfilling. It’s this immiserating experience that Severance truly captures.
The entire concept of severance is fundamentally barbaric: It’s not just that the procedure requires voluntarily submitting to brain damage. It’s also that the life of the innies is so bleak that they have to be kept under constant surveillance to ensure they don’t commit suicide. They can’t quit; when they try to, their outies—who sought these jobs in the first place—simply won’t allow it. And innies can’t communicate with outies whose bodies they share.
They also can’t escape. In the previous season, the protagonist Mark (played by Adam Scott) was one of four innies working at Lumon who staged a revolt after figuring out a way to briefly wake themselves up in the outside world, before being sucked back into the office. In the most recent episode, a coworker who heard about this adventure excitedly approaches him. She wants to know: When he was awake out there, did he see the sky? She never has. Nobody in the office has.
And yet, those Americans trapped in bullshit jobs may envy the innies. They have hope, and they have each other. And perhaps more importantly, they don’t miss the things they’ve never had. The characters on Severance don’t lament the purposelessness of their jobs, or dream of going back to the land, or finding religion, or staying home to raise a family. They don’t yearn for better work-life balance—because work is the only place they’re alive at all. It’s only for those people who’ve seen the sky that 40 hours a week in a fluorescent-lit cubicle feels like a tragic waste of a life.
There was a time when America’s corporate planners thought they could quell the existential angst inherent to life in the email mines by making the professional more personal—replacing words like company with family, bosses with mentors, and appropriate workplace boundaries with frolicking in the corporate ball pit. There were sensitivity trainings, inclusive-language guides, inane team-building exercises, and various other productivity-destroying initiatives, many of which are now being quietly assigned to the dustbin of history. The Trump vibe shift is here, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and their attendant ill-conceived corporate constructions, aren’t going to survive it.
But as the era of bringing your whole self to work dies out, the opposite fantasy is in vogue: Bring none of yourself to work. Hence why so many Americans refused to go back to the office after the pandemic, but Severance takes this one step further. Instead of work-life balance, you will have work-life separation: a shadow self, a stranger with your face, whose sole purpose in life is to endure all the boredom and indignity and weird, cultish HR indoctrination sessions, so that you don’t have to. Let that guy labor all day at his desk. Let him suffer while you sleep.
Some commentators have held up Severance as a scathing indictment of late capitalism, a Marxist call to arms for alienated workers everywhere. Yet the draw of the series, and the strange temptations of a severed life, don’t come from what Severance has to say about politics; they come from what it says about people. Namely: It’s not being exploited at work that bothers us. It’s that we have to be awake for it.
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