Why Severance Feels Less Like Fiction and More Like a Warning
What if the only way to reclaim your life from work was to forget it entirely?
The blur between work and life
It is 8:57 AM. Your laptop hums faintly in the blue glow of your bedroom, a temple of productivity and rest, but mostly just a bed.
Your work status is still set to “away,” though you are, in fact, very much here.
Here, in the space where your body exists, but your mind drifts elsewhere—split across emails, spreadsheets, and the unrelenting need to appear engaged. You take a deep breath and click “available.”
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The pandemic blurred the lines between work and life, and now, post-pandemic, those lines have simply ceased to exist.
Enter Severance, the Apple TV+ series that felt, in many ways, less like speculative fiction and more like a scream into the void of modern employment.
The show’s premise—employees at Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure to separate their work selves (“innies”) from their personal selves (“outies”)—is extreme, but its appeal is easy to understand.
Haven’t we all, at some point, fantasized about leaving work at work?
The horror of complete detachment
And yet, there’s something sinister in the fantasy. The promise of total detachment feels less like freedom and more like a symptom of something deeply broken.
It’s easy to joke about wanting a severance chip installed in our brains, but the show’s real horror lies in the fact that we already live in a world where work colonizes every waking thought.
Severance asks us to consider: if the only way to reclaim our personal lives is through literal brain surgery, then haven’t we already lost?
In the show, the “innies” of Lumon are trapped, living out an infinite loop of office drudgery with no memory of life beyond the fluorescent-lit corridors.
The “outies,” in turn, see work as a black hole, a chunk of time that simply vanishes from their days. It’s a metaphor, sure, but not a particularly subtle one.
Zoom fatigue, weekend emails, the creeping dread of Sunday night—these are all symptoms of the same condition.
The work trap
We, the Gen Z workforce, were promised something different. We entered the professional world with the vocabulary of boundaries and burnout, mental health days and remote work flexibility.
And yet, we find ourselves in the same trap, only now the cage is lined with self-care rhetoric and millennial-pink productivity apps.
What Severance ultimately exposes is that the real nightmare isn’t just the loss of work-life balance. It’s the realization that true separation might not even be possible.
Capitalism has never been a nine-to-five arrangement—it is, and always has been, a full-body experience.
So we log on. We draft emails. We sit in meetings where we speak in circles, playing roles we no longer remember auditioning for.
And when the workday ends, we close our laptops, stretch, and prepare to do it all again.
No severance needed.
Photography Paolo Pineda
Creative direction Vince Uy
Fashion Rex Atienza and Roko Arceo
Grooming Xeng Zulueta
Hair Mong Amado
Art direction Mike Miguel
Retouching Summer Untalan
Model Alfio Schmidt (Women Management)
Fashion associate Corven Uy
Photography assistants Isidro Pejoto and Cesar Salve
