Severance, the Cult of Business, and Creating Your Own Innie
Please try to enjoy your home life and work life equally.
Severance has been everywhere lately. Either you’ve seen it, or you’re sick of people telling you to watch it. The critically-acclaimed Apple TV+ show, which has amassed an impressive 3 billion minutes of streaming worldwide, wrapped up its second season with an explosive finale last week. The popularity of Severance, a show built on the idea of separating a persons work ‘innie’ and home ‘outie’, is largely thanks to the focus on solving the widespread problem of a work-life imbalance. With experimental neurosurgery off the table for now, is there still something Severance can teach us about building a healthy separation between our innies and outies?
Work-life balance problems are a growing concern. According to a recent international survey of 26,000 employees, 83% of people listed work-life balance as a key factor for their job - making it more of a priority than pay or job security. If you’re a remote worker, this can be an even bigger issue - with the expectation to be constantly online making working from home feel more like living at work. With almost half of us working remotely at least part of the time, it’s a society-wide problem.
Science fiction like Severance has a long history of tackling social issues like this, says Dr. Pete Boss, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University. “It takes something everyday”, he explains, “and it could render it fresh for us and make us think about our habits and socio-cultural patterns.” In this case, medically induced severance of ‘innie’ from ‘outie’ reflects the problems of work-life balance.
But Severance is not just shining a critical light on work-life balance, but work culture as a whole. The way it does this is by mixing something strange with something familiar, in order “to make something rather eerie.” “It looks sort of like offices”, Dr. Boss said, “but also at the same time has all these rather strange things in it.” And the Severance office is certainly strange. While it looks normal at first, a brutalist office equipped with fancy retro computers, the nature of the “mysterious and important” work and the strange corporate wellness sessions reveal something sinister.
Perhaps strangest of all is the office language, which Severance creator Dan Erickson said in a recent interview was intended to present Lumon as “weird grey area between a cult and a company”. Severed employees are expected to adhere to the company’s “core principles”, and to work towards “taming the four tempers” by “eradicating from their essence childish folly”. It’s like normal corporate jargon on steroids, intended to inspire allegiance and ultimately strip the innies of any individuality.
“It’s always about control, isn’t it”, said Dr. Boss, “you go back and think of the way that the clerics always tried to be the ones to interpret the Bible, why they were so hostile to it being printed in plain language, you know rather than Latin because it took away their control over it”.
While the cult-like language of Severance might seem ridiculous, in reality it’s not too different to regular office jargon. Since the 1950s, certain phrases have become commonplace for office workers worldwide. Most of us are guilty of talking about “adding value” or “moving the needle”, or other similar phrases which were devised by consultants to make workplace communication less emotional and more precise. Like Lumon in Severance, some companies like Google have their own unique phrases that every new hire needs to learn if they want to feel like they belong. Embracing work jargon in the workplace, especially as a younger employee, is a way to show you understand the job and fit in with the workplace culture.
Switching in and out of business speak could come with another benefit - the creation of separated innie and outie personalities. While it’s not as high tech as the elevator in Severance, there is evidence that switching between different languages causes your brain to change between two personalities. “My mindset in English tends to be more serious and less relaxed”, says Dario, who speaks both English and Italian fluently, “for example if I have anxiety in English it would be more difficult to get out of it while Italian is easier”.
Bilingual people often notice a difference in themselves as they switch between languages, and it’s common to find that conversations in one’s mother tongue carry more emotional weight, while a second language might be more practical and efficient. For Dario, switching from English at work to Italian at home can help leave the stress of his job behind. “I do think that speaking English in more professional settings helps to keep work life and home life separated”, he explained, “it also helps ‘cause none of my family communicates in English with me.”
While switching between two languages might not be possible for everyone, why not try taking advanage of being bilingual in business speak to differentiate your work and home personality. If you’re struggling with work-life balance, embracing work jargon while you’re online, then leaving it behind as soon as you log off might be worth trying.
Your outie will thank you.