I’m about halfway through season two of Severance, which means I’m two months or so away from being timely. It also means that everything I’m observing here could be overturned with a twist in the final episode. But nonetheless, I am diving in because I want to work through one reason the show is so emblematic of the modern condition.
If you’ve been living under a rock, the idea behind the Apple+ science fiction series Severance is that a new technology allows you to separate your work and home lives into two separate people. When you go to work, your work persona (“innie”) becomes conscious and does all the drudgery for you; when you leave the building, your brain snaps back to your “outie,” or your personal life.
**Spoilers through season 2, episode 6 of Severance below, though more general premise than plot**
Predictably, the life of an innie is awful. They live exclusively in the office, never seeing the sun. Because they remember nothing about their outside life, they have very little personality. One of my favorite scenes is when the office gets together to play a “getting to know you” game, but no one has any facts to offer about themselves because their whole existence is literally work. Speaking of the work, it is “mysterious and important;” in other words, it’s completely opaque and pointless. The workers have no idea what impact their work has on the outside world, no idea what it means, only that it needs to be accomplished by 5 pm. It’s a parody of the predicament of the modern knowledge worker, almost too obvious.
What surprised me is that in Severance, home life is scarcely better. Our protagonist Mark S. spends his time either drinking himself into a stupor in his barely-lit townhome or attending intolerable dinner parties with his eccentric brother-in-law. He exchanges banal comments with his next-door neighbor over the placement of the recycling bins and occasionally talks with his sister. That’s the extent of his life.
Other coworkers aren’t much better. Dylan G. is a checked-out father who can’t hold down a job or even maintain interest in a hobby—the kind of dad who could accurately be described as “babysitting” his own children. Irving B. is a little more interesting: at least he has a hobby. But does painting the same thing over and over really count, especially if what’s being painted is something from work? He has a dog and a mysterious phone contact he reports to (again, this is work), but no friends or other relationships.
This is, to my mind, the irony of Severance. How many people claim that the reason their life is so bad is because of the insatiable monster of capitalism taking all their time? Severance presents us with the option to sell off that part of ourselves, to make it into a separate person. But it doesn’t help. Even when the characters are freed from economic pressures, they don’t do anything interesting with their lives. Instead, they are barely existing. Their lives have no meaning.
Why is modern life so hollow? Perhaps part of it is that we’ve taken all the meaning out of life besides work. Going to college? Make sure that your major is aligned with a good paying job; no one has time for mere learning. Starting to get good at a hobby? Turn it into a side hustle. With the rise of influencer culture, even going on vacation or playing a video game become a job. The only things that get a pass are things that are completely mindless, and even then, we feel guilty about sinking time into them.
We’ve forgotten how to have true leisure. Not just rest, but a life that is human and humane. Of course, for me this comes back to the downfall of the humanities as a way of taking the project of human-being-ness seriously. Part of the philosophy of a liberal education is that knowledge doesn’t have to be useful; it has intrinsic interest and value for itself. Learning from the centuries of humans that came before us makes us into better people in some intangible, indescribable way. English majors are often the butt of the joke, but I think we’re starting to see what the world is like without that kind of liberal arts grounding society took for granted.
This leads me to the one part of the show I find out unbelievable: before his severing, Mark S. was supposedly a history professor. Would someone familiar with the great works actually go through with selling their soul to a corporation? If they had given him any other profession, I might have bought it.
But I can only suspend my disbelief so far.
**No spoilers in the comments past episode 6, please. I’m almost there!**
