Apple TV’s Severance presents a dystopia in which workers are literally split between personal and professional selves, but how far is this from our own reality under capitalism?
“Lumen doesn’t have to be your whole life.”
But for many of us, the office already is.
In the final episode of Severance’s second season, Mark, one of the series’ “severed” workers manages to speak, obliquely, to his innie self. “Lumen doesn’t have to be your whole life,” he says. It’s a line that cuts through the plot and into something more fundamental, a quiet, desperate hope that work doesn’t have to define us. But of course, under capitalism, it already does.
Capitalism has stolen your face
Severance imagines a world where your consciousness is split at the elevator doors: one self for the workplace, another for the rest of your life. What if you never left the office? What if your memories existed only inside it? What if your ‘real’ life, your family, your relationships, your freedom, were kept from you by design?
The conceit is science fiction, but only just. Many people already switch selves at work: the voice, the clothes, the careful affect. We code-switch for class, for gender, for race; we rehearse the lines in the mirror before the interview. We smile on Teams. We present “our best selves” on LinkedIn, which is to say, not ourselves at all.
“Severance imagines a future in which workers are alienated from their own memories, but the present has already alienated us from time, energy, and identity.”
Under neoliberalism, the distinction between “personal” and “professional” life is both sacred and constantly violated. Don’t bring your politics to work. Don’t talk about your pay. But do bring your passion. Bring your hobbies. Join the away day. Be your ‘authentic self’ on-brand. The severance isn’t in the technology, it’s in the ideology.
Your best years are already gone
Capitalism doesn’t just alienate us from the products of our labour. It alienates us from ourselves. From each other. From time. In Severance, the innie self doesn’t even know what year it is, an unsettling image for anyone who has blinked and found five years gone in the same job, the same commute, the same fluorescent lighting.
“You are not your job. But under capitalism, your job owns you.”
This is the horror at the heart of the series and the horror at the heart of capitalist work. That you could give the best years of your life, your energy, your youth, your clarity, to a company that sees you only as a data point in HR. And when the layoffs come, or the restructuring, or the rebrand? You’ll be thanked for your service and quietly deleted.
We were always the product
If Severance offers a warning, it’s not of a terrifying future, but of a present in which we’ve already surrendered too much. The workplace doesn’t need to implant chips in our brains. It has Teams, Slack, performance reviews, productivity trackers, swipe cards, NDAs. The architecture of surveillance is already here and worse, we’ve internalised it.
Mark’s plea to his innie “Lumen doesn’t have to be your whole life” is also a message to us. But it’s not enough to say work shouldn’t define us. We must build a world in which it can’t. That means reclaiming time, resisting the commodification of the self, and refusing to live severed.
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