Imagine a world in which a metaphorical yet impenetrable wall can be erected in your mind to keep your work life and your private life completely separate. As you ride the office elevator up towards your floor, a switch is flipped and you instantly become utterly focused on the job, with zero awareness of your life outside work. From nine to five, your friends and family have no place in your head.
The reverse transformation happens as you leave the office. When the elevator door opens at the ground floor, you can no longer recall whatever it is you’ve been doing over the past eight hours.
If your imagination isn’t up to exploring this mind-blowing scenario, try watching Severance, a sci-fi thriller series on the Apple TV+ streaming service.
Severance is hugely entertaining. It is also thought-provoking, particularly about our complicated relationships with work and how it intersects with other aspects of our lives.
You’d never have that eureka moment about a work issue while in the shower
Happy split
The importance attached to work-life balance has intensified in recent years, with the Covid-19 pandemic adding tremendously to the subject’s weight and seriousness.
Severance’s central device of a tech-induced dichotomy between the personal and the professional raises intriguing questions about what employers and employees really want.
Would employers be happier if their employees were free from all personal distractions and could therefore concentrate fully on work? Wouldn’t this translate into higher productivity?
What’s not to like about stopping work worries from spilling over into your personal life?
Would it be better for employers if staff could remember nothing about work when they’re away from the workplace? Sensitive information wouldn’t get leaked. Job dissatisfaction wouldn’t be a conversation topic among family and friends. And presumably, employees’ work-related stress would be reduced because they’d be leaving behind the pressure and anxiety that are part of their job whenever they walked out of the office.
Meanwhile for employees overwhelmed by personal problems, wouldn’t a Severance-style ‘mindwipe’ chip implanted in the brain provide an escape from all-consuming spouse/children/money troubles while at work? What’s not to like about being able to prevent your work worries spilling over into your personal life, while your private struggles would have no effect whatsoever on your work performance?
Psychic apartheid
The thing is, though, that the mindwipe chip doesn’t just apply to the negatives, as the wall it puts up keeps out the good stuff as well as the bad. If work and private lives were well and truly divided, there would be no opportunity for ideas in an individual’s brain to cross-pollinate. You’d never have that eureka moment about a work issue while in the shower or when chatting with a pal. Likewise, your experiences at work couldn’t enrich other facets of your life.
Sometimes, fiction should stay fictional. I’d be wary of those who seek to recruit only worker bees and have no interest at all in who their employees are and what they do outside of work.
Severance raises the spectre of employers owning and manipulating their employees’ minds, eliminating their emotions and denying them their memories. It is one that should fill workers with dread.
