In the series Severance, some employees at Lumon undergo an extreme procedure: a brain chip that separates their consciousness between the ‘work self’ and the ‘outside work self.’ Inside the office, they have no access to personal memories; outside, they don’t know what they do during work hours. The proposal sounds dystopian, but curiously, some people see this idea as a solution to the conflicts of modern life. What would lead us to consider such a drastic decision?
For 66% of Brazilians, besides earning money, doing what they love is considered the most important aspect of work. Dissatisfaction with jobs that don’t provide fulfillment has led to a phenomenon known as conscious quitting, where workers resign due to a misalignment of values. Generation Z, in particular, is marked by this constant search for purpose but also by high turnover in the job market.
On the other hand, balancing personal values with the need to pay the bills is not always possible. For many, work is less about fulfillment and more about survival. Aligning career and purpose feels like a distant luxury for those facing exhausting work hours, dealing with the precariousness of public transport, and confronting other daily challenges.
Work as a source of fulfillment?
Not everyone believes that work should be a source of purpose or personal fulfillment. In the book Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe questions the idea that we should seek love and meaning in our jobs. Movements like anti-work — which gained traction in online forums like Reddit — challenge the narrative that work needs to be a central part of life. The motto “work to live, don’t live to work” opposes the logic that we need to love what we do in order to justify long hours, low pay, and the constant sense of inadequacy.
The phenomenon of quiet quitting, where workers limit themselves to doing the bare minimum to avoid burnout, is seen by some as a lack of ambition, but by others as resistance to exploitation. There are also those who seek purpose in work in an almost obsessive way, trying to fill an existential void or find an identity. Do we seek purpose in work because we lack purpose outside of it?
Compartmentalization as Survival
The issue of ignorance as a form of happiness resonates in the themes explored in Severance. Separating our personal identity from our professional one seems increasingly impossible when work defines our social value. We compartmentalize to survive: we adapt our language to corporate environments, recalibrate dreams to meet productivity expectations, and hide parts of who we are to follow protocols.
Just like Mark S., the protagonist of the series, uses “severance” to escape grief, many of us also fragment our identities to cope with the demands of daily life. However, when this compartmentalization becomes a non-consensual norm, what is the psychological cost of it? Are we just trying to survive work, or are we, in some way, disconnecting parts of ourselves to endure it?
The series Severance proposes an extreme separation, but real life imposes subtler fragmentations. Between those who seek purpose in work and those who only want a paycheck, the question remains: is it possible to balance identity and job without resorting to an internal “severance”? How much are we willing to sacrifice—or ignore—to keep functioning?
Perhaps the answer lies less in love or hate for work and more in how we choose (or are forced to) deal with it. And if ignorance truly is a form of happiness, would we be willing to forgo full awareness of what we do and why we do it?
Although the concept of “severance” may seem like a distant dystopia, some experts believe that the technology to separate memories and identities is closer than we think. The show consulted neuroscientists to explore the plausibility of the procedure, and the idea of memory manipulation is already part of real scientific research.
