DANGER: has your job become your identity?

What Apple TV+'s Severance tells us about work

(This article contains zero spoilers about Severance)

The second series of Severance (Apple TV+) has elevated it into one of the most talked about shows in the world, interesting for us not least because its location, the workplace of Lumon Industries, feels like the show’s true main character. The whole show obliquely speaks to us about the role that work fills in our lives.

Severance imagines a world where workers are offered a procedure that disconnects their consciousness at work from their consciousness in their domestic lives. These two personas, ‘innie’ at work and ‘outie’ at home live completely autonomously from each other, oblivious to the experiences and emotions of their other half.

The disconnection is stark, the innie works all day at their desks, gets in the elevator to leave and immediately reawakens in the elevator, albeit 16 hours later ready to start a new workday. Sometimes innies feel hungover and can only speculate what their outies might have done the day before.

For innies work becomes something of a neverending dream, seemingly pointless data filtering tasks are punctuated by moments of almost surreal morale building team activities. In this upside down world coworkers become our families and work is the substance of our existence.

Not only is the show elite programme making, but the dissection of the plot on social media is dazzlingly good. One TikTok analysis argues that the show is a metaphor for how we compartmentalise of our lives leaving real-world stressors at home. But is that really a good thing?

“One popular TikTok analysis argues that Severance is a metaphor for how we compartmentalize our lives—leaving real-world stressors at home and work concerns at the door. But is that really a good thing?”

This week I reviewed the new whistleblower memoir about Meta Careless People for the Financial Times. The book is the testimony of former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams and gives us a first person account of a culture curdled by power, money and untethered to principles or morals. The title of the book is an allusion to a description of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a tale, if we need reminding where wealth, status and success are worthless achievements when stripped of meaning or moral grounding. At one stage Wynn-Williams, who works in the Public Policy team and frequently interacts with senior leadership finds herself at Davos chatting over wine with Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg pulls back the curtain to reveal the intentionality of the culture at Facebook/Meta:

‘Sheryl tells me that the punishing scale of work is by design. A choice Facebook’s leaders had made. That staffers should be given too much to do because it’s best if no one has spare time. That’s where the trouble and territoriality start. The fewer employees, the harder they work. The answer to work is more work. To encourage this, the Facebook offices are overflowing with “perks.” I think this part of Silicon Valley work life is something everyone’s heard about by now. It’s parodied on TV shows. The offices are like a never-­ending kid’s birthday party.’

Meta’s culture, as described in Careless People, and Lumon Industries in Severance share a fundamental similarity: they demand total compliance, discourage reflection, and cultivate an environment where work is all-consuming. I’m certain that these aren’t the only two organisations guilty of such behaviour.

The late David Graber wrote about Bullshit Jobs, roles which served no real purpose, existing only to maintain bureaucratic structures or to give the illusion of productivity. In both Severance and the real world the jobs create feelings of alienation and disconnection as workers struggle to see the value of what they are doing.

In Severance, aside from the mundanity of the job it is the never-ending birthday party culture that the show vividly captures. Like at Meta, Lumon Industries creates regular events as side-shows to distract workers from the meaningless nature of their jobs.

Many of us are familiar with our company asking us to bring our whole selves to work (something that I have an issue with as it is often used inappropriately). In Severance, work doesn’t just ask for our whole selves, it becomes our whole selves. Now, reread that insight, but swap in Sandberg’s vision of Facebook’s culture in its place.

Ultimately, Severance is a thought experiment about the nature of work in a world where productivity takes precedence over humanity. It paints work as a place where workers are encouraged to demonstrate enthusiasm for their jobs despite them being disembodied, bureaucratic nonsense. While the show doesn’t seek to preach about what we’ve become, we shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to glance in the mirror it is holding up for us.

Severance is way better than I’ve made it sound here, watch it on Apple TV+

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Getting heat at work? Subject Access Requests are your friend

About a year ago I posted on the Make Work Better newsletter that everyone in the UK (and in Europe) has the right to ask their employer to see everything written about them on email/chat. While you should pick your moment (as it’s something of a nuclear option), filing this sort of 'Subject Access Request' is a great trump card when your firm seems to be trying to get rid of you. Maybe a slow witted manager seems to be picking fault in an attempt to make your life difficult.

Over the course of the year I've had so many people get in touch to thank me, but this is the first time that someone has publicly spoken of their success using it: shout out to Richard Ventham for getting to the other side and sharing his tale of a late ADHD diagnosis.

• Flexible working is also meaningful for in-person workers - it just looks different. If you work in an organisation with onsite workers as well as office workers this is very worthwhile piece of work. MIT Sloan Management Review publish a detailed research study that followed a US clothing retailer who drove high employee retention by giving ‘people more choice over when, where, and how they work in exchange for accountability for results’. Employees were given the technology to swap shifts and to interact with managers. The firm saw 75% annual retention rates for in-store workers (in a sector that often sees 80% turnover), huge increases in employee net promoter scores and increases in customer satisfaction

• Google founder says “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” of work, and adds that “I recommend being in the office at least every weekday”. (Shall I Google that for you Sergey? There’s actually research that says that working more than 50 hours a week kills our total productivity with tiredness)

• Satya Nadella thinks we should all calm down with the chat about Artificial General Intelligence, our first step should be to get to 10% economic growth per year - this seems pretty smart to me

• How can a city effectively function when young people can’t afford to live in it? This is what Eliza Filby asks in the Standard:

‘The capital has always been a class melting pot, where the best culture rises to the top — be it punk and grime, Zadie Smith or Mike Leigh. As the inheritocracy reaches maturity, we’ll be left with trust fund creatives and well-connected nepo baby mediocrity — with London at risk of losing its place as the world’s focal point of emerging culture.’

• The Artificial Intelligence Show is the most essential listen right now, this week they dissect Ezra Klein’s NYT piece about the imminence of AGI and what it means for our jobs. Brilliant

• Here’s an interesting explanation of why so many organisations are trying to enforce RTO, it’s because employers see the rise of employee power and want to smack it down by asserting control. Bosses, like in this video, are openly saying that they want to take revenge on ‘lazy’ employees. There’s a plausible argument that some parts of society are trying to make conditions worse for workers right now

• Despite that a report by McKinsey found that in office work was no more productive than home working…

• … in contrast a fully randomised analysis that allocated teams of workers into rotating shift patterns found that WFH increased productivity by 12% by reducing the distractions during work. (These two studies aren’t incompatible btw, the second study was of workers individually trying to deal with focus work). As the graph below shows the productivity gains weren’t evenly distributed:

Out last week was ‘A Story is a Deal’ by former podcast guest Will Storr. Will is an expert on the power of storytelling, and I found his framing of the most important stories to tell inside organisations to be incredibly persuasive. He’s especially convincing when he’s explaining how a clear sense of identity is so often the defining part of a person’s existence. He says:

‘In my spare time, I volunteer at a phone line for people in crisis. In the hundreds of hours I've spent talking to people, I've found the suicidal tend to be suffering either from chronic pain, recent bereavement or, most commonly, identity failure. They're seriously and persistently lacking in connection or status, usually both. They feel the character they're playing in the story of their lives has failed and that they're trapped in their failure. The pain of life in the hopeless stuckness of their halted story has become too much to bear’.

Storr goes on to explain how our jobs are a vital component of our identities and how leaders should seek to strengthen that connection. Storr’s style is effortless and evidence-filled without ever getting bogged down in data. Really enjoyed this one.

A Story is A Deal by Will Storr

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