Jan 17, 2025
Op-ed: What TV’s “Severance” Teaches Us About Work-Life Balance

(Warning: contains spoilers for season one)
Today marks the highly anticipated return of Apple TV’s hit show, Severance — a thriller that follows employees at Lumon Industries who have undergone a medical procedure that severs their memories between their work and personal lives. The show is an eery portrayal of what we know as work-life balance — a concept that POWER’s Co-CEO, Asher Raphael, believes to be unrealistic.
In a thoughtful and compelling, op-ed, Asher analyzes what this popular TV show reveals about work-life balance and how fully embracing the integration of our careers and personal experiences leads to a better quality of life.
Read the full piece below.
On January 17th, the highly-anticipated second season of “Severance” premieres on Apple TV+. The hit show took our global obsession with work-life balance and turned it into a pop culture phenomenon. The show doesn’t explore the surface-level interpretation of work-life balance we’re accustomed to. Instead, the creative team behind Severance portrays a more perceptive, accurate understanding of what we’re really looking for, which isn’t actually the balancing of work and life but the separation of the two. And it comes to a very clear conclusion: we’re striving for the wrong thing.
Directed by Ben Stiller, Severance is part science fiction, part dark comedy, part thriller. Think Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Spike Jonze got together and had a baby. The show takes place in a world where a controversial elective medical procedure implants a chip into the brain that severs the self into two separate people, affectionately known as an “innie” and an “outie”. The innies spend their workday with no knowledge of who they are outside the workplace. They have no recollection of where they’re from, if they have a family, or even their own last name. The outies, on the other hand, exist everywhere but work, with all the knowledge of their personal history but zero memories of who they are Monday through Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. They don’t know who they work with, what they work on, or even what they ate for lunch.
The distinct separation portrayed on Severance is what everyone in corporate America – employer and employee – is striving for(minus the brain surgery). Business owners are constantly telling their employees, both implicitly and explicitly, not to bring their personal lives into the workplace. They want a workforce that works, not one weighed down by grocery shopping, kids football games, or sick parents. In the race to increase the bottom line, the goal is separation not balance. That’s why the fictional Lumon Industries not only performs the severance procedures, but also employs its patients. A severed workforce is a focused one.
Yet it’s not only employers that long for separation. The American workforce is also asking for the same thing for a very relatable reason: they’re miserable at work. When the show’s protagonist Mark tells his co-worker Helly that he hopes his outie has things he cares about, it’s because work isn’t one of those things. That’s the lived reality for most people; staring at the clock wishing it would fast-forward to 5:00 so they can get back to the people and things they actually care about. In fact, that was the literal inspiration for Severance. Executive producer Dan Erickson came up with the idea when he found himself in a “mind-numbing” job that he dreamed of disassociating from.
While work was the catalyst for the show, it’s not why all of the characters chose to be severed. Mark didn’t seek severance to escape the boredom of work, he sought it to escape the pain of life. After his wife dies in a car accident, he’s left consumed by grief. He’s unable to focus on work, disassociates from friends and family, and is trapped in a constant state of depression and agony. Being severed offered Mark a lifeline and a welcome reprieve, allowing him to forget his pain for eight hours a day. In the midst of life’s darker moments, haven’t we all wished for some sort of temporary escape?
As season one progresses, its layers unfold, revealing a show less about work and more about humanity. In this science fiction world, the characters get the separation they think they want, only to discover they don’t actually want it at all. Over nine episodes, the innies become less focused on their work as they grow increasingly consumed with discovering their other self who they are outside of work. In that process, these memory-less vapid corporate widgets come to not only care for each other, but sacrifice for each other and even fall in love.
Even with surgical separation, the human need for connection prevails. We don’t want to be severed, we want to be whole. In everything we do. When we go to work, we want to bring our personal histories, passions, religions, loved ones, and politics with us. We want to share and relive all of life’s joys with the people we work with day in and day out, from graduations to weddings to the birth of our children. And when our lives are touched by sorrow and trauma, we also want to share our pain. Because, as Mark’s sister tells him, “forgetting for eight hours a day isn’t the same as healing.”
Thankfully, this is achievable without brain surgery. All we need to do is reimagine the workplace. This isn’t hypothetical for me; I’ve seen it play out in real time with my own employees. Like so many business leaders, early in my management career I did my best to create the work-life balance I thought my leaders and frontline workers were looking for. I quickly learned, however, that I was on a fools errand.
So we went against the grain. Instead of pursuing work and life separately, we began championing the taboo idea of work-life integration. We asked our people to bring all of themselves to work – their histories, passions, fears, and traumas. We encouraged vulnerability and asked our leaders to go first, creating a safe place for people to speak their truth. In this environment, I’ve seen our people open up to each other about everything from their experience at war, to getting into and out of an abusive relationship, to the struggles of transitioning from professional athletics to corporate America. This approach has created a different, better kind of workplace. One where suppression turns into healing, coworkers become friends, and work becomes purpose. But you don’t have to just take just my word for it. In 2024, Fortune Magazine named us the #14 Best Place to Work in the Country based on anonymous third party surveys of our employees.
Reimagining the workplace doesn’t mean everything about work will be fun. It can’t all be waffle parties and finger traps, as much as Severance’s Dylan would like. No matter the industry, job title, or responsibility, the road to excellence is filled with monotony. But when you’re doing it with people you care about for a mission you believe in, Sunday nights become filled with excitement instead of dread. And the only way to create that is not to sever work and life, but to fully exist in every single moment.
This piece was originally published on Asher Raphael’s LinkedIn.
Back to News