Work-life Balance Isn't All It's Made Out To Be

AN DEEP-DIVE OF SEVERANCE ON APPLE TV+

- The Count

We’ve all wished at some point that we could divorce our personal lives from the gruelling responsibilities of our jobs. A healthy work-life balance is often held up as some vaunted ideal – the dream is to check out from work entirely when 6 PM rolls around and not receive a single message on Slack until the next morning.

Severance, a new sci-fi series from Apple TV+, takes that to its logical extreme. Workers divide their minds into two halves, and neither half retains any memories from the other. Their personal selves take the elevator up to the office every morning, and their work selves take over when they step out.

From the perspective of your personal self, this means driving to work each morning at 9AM, and then leaving immediately at 5PM. You remember nothing from your workday, nor even the exact nature of your job, so you’re blissfully unbothered outside of work hours. It’s a fascinating concept to unpack, one that Severance isn’t afraid to expand upon and explore.

But there’s a cruel contradiction at the heart of it all. While this arrangement sounds great for who you are outside of work, you’re also creating a second consciousness that has no memories of your outside self. This version of you doesn’t even know your name at first and has to be informed of it. In fact, from their point of view, they never ever leave the office.