Severed Preference

Severance, day jobs, and the pros & cons of mind splitting

As I’m writing this, season 2 of Severance (or at least the first episode of the new season) is very shortly going to be released. I can probably count on one hand the amount of shows I’ve binged in the past 4 years. I’m not much of a show-watcher…I greatly prefer movies over dedicating my entire existence to a series, or typically I do anyway. A year or two ago I got through the entirety of Bojack Horseman which I really enjoyed. I also watched the whole series of The Office over COVID since somehow I had never seen any episodes before. Admittedly there are other shows I am interested in diving into; Stranger Things, Breaking Bad (which I’m told is the best tv show of all time?) and maybe a few others. It’s really just finding the time to dive into something new…if I’m going to sacrifice the time, it needs to be life changing for me or else it’s hard to see it as a worthwhile investment.

Severance is a different story though.

A very good friend of mine was talking to me about Severance back in 2022 when the first season first came out, and I was definitely listening but I also knew I probably wasn’t ever going to actually sit down and watch it so I didn’t take the ramblings too seriously. But for some reason, just over this past Summer, I found myself with some spare time and I decided to give it a try. The first season I believe is only 10 episodes (though they are longer episodes, between 45 min-hour long each) so it seemed easy enough to get through and I could determine if I liked it enough to really invest myself in it. (I remember why I started watching it now. My girlfriend was in Italy working at a ballet intensive so I was deprived of my standard evening conversations and company. Although…this did provide time for solo couch potato adventures)

The first half a page of this article has been about almost nothing…so let me more swiftly get to the point.

Anyway I watched the show and completely fell in love with it and became entirely hooked. For anybody who doesn’t know, Severance follows 4 employees at a company called Lumon (though it primarily follows Mark, played by Adam Scott) who have undergone a surgery called severance, where they have a microchip put into their brain to assist them with achieving the perfect work/life balance. To achieve this, essentially how it works is when they go into work, their “outside brain” shuts off and switches over to their “work brain”. So when they go into work, they have no idea who they are on the outside, what Lumon industries is, and they barely even know what they do at their job. And then when they leave, the microchip kicks in and they switch back to their outside brain, and the outside version of them has no idea what they did at work that day, who they were with, or anything about anything. The severed employees of Lumon call the work version of themselves their “innie” and the real life version of themselves their “outie”.

Seems like a crazy concept. It is. It’s a complete psychological mind-fuck not only because of the concept of the show, but it’s one of those shows that just puts soooo much attention into every little detail, and it rewards the viewer for paying close attention, which is really fun. But basically there’s a lot of evil stuff going on, mystery, very dry “The Office-style” humor, random goats and some pretty dark moments too. Clearly, I highly suggest the show.

But the goal of this article isn’t to deliver a Severance review, although I’d be happy to…it’s more so to linger on the concept of the show. It seems like complete science fiction and I suppose it is, with the microchip and all, but what is not science fiction is the idea of the separation between the work version of ourselves and the real life version.

WFM

Confession time, I work at Whole Foods Market. I’m what’s called an “Associate Team Leader” or something of the in-store shopper team that handles online grocery orders. There are somewhere between 20-30 shoppers on the team that I keep track of and it’s a grand time. Whole Foods is not my passion…songs, writing, creating, those are the passions…but it’s something that helps me financially back my creative endeavors in a way that hopefully with the right investments, I can one day soon let it go.

Something that I was extremely aware of and cautious of when I first took this job, and then inevitably got a few promotions that required me to dedicate more time to the job, was how I was going to make sure to keep my actual life separate from my “job-life”. (I don’t like calling the Foods my work because being an artist is my work. The Foods is just a job. Also, I like to call it “the Foods”) I was afraid that if the two started to mix too much, that I would actually start to believe that I was a Whole Foods employee who also sometimes does music, and that mental shift might make me settle into a lifestyle that I don’t at all want to settle in. So I took great measures to keep any information about my actual life out of the hands of anybody I work with. I wanted to be a different person. I wanted the microchip.

So at the Foods, virtually nobody knows that I write songs and do music. (or if they do, it’s not because I told them. Crazy stalkers, ya feel me?) Nobody knows when I have a show coming up, nobody knows when I’ve just released music, nobody knows that I’ve launched a Substack and publish articles. There, I’m just associate team leader Aaron. And I prefer it that way.

Is this the right thing to do? Does anybody else do a similar thing?

I absolutely do my best to see any time I have to spend there as an opportunity to be inspired, or witness a new story or learn about something that can in turn be repurposed for a song or some other output (like an article) but even doing that sometimes is hard. I get a weird feeling sitting at home writing, and starting a song that feels like it was inspired by something that happened at the Foods. Strumming a guitar and pondering words while imagining me fulfilling a stranger's request for organic ginger root and Tahini makes my skin crawl. So even though I may be inspired in some way while I’m there…it’s hard for me to not put it in a box and not touch it.

Is it a healthy thing to keep our lives separate? Or should everything be intertwined? Do the versions of us all need their own space to thrive and exist, as well as their time to vacate the view of the world depending on their surroundings? Or should there just be one us who is present at all times?