How Severed Is Your Workplace Personality?
A zeitgeist TV drama offers food for thought on the stresses of office life in the pandemic era.
Is your office self real? Above: “Garden of Eden,” representing an abandoned workspace, at Milan Art Week.
Photographer: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty
Many of the world’s employees have been separated from their workplace for a large chunk of the past two pandemic-disrupted years, and it seems most of us aren’t too keen to go back. Just 3% of white-collar workers want to return five days a week, one survey showed earlier this year. Were it possible, the idea of sending a doppelganger into the office to serve eight hours on our behalf would probably be quite appealing.
That may be one reason for the popularity of Severance, the Apple TV-plus drama that concluded its first season this month. The dystopian techno-fantasy concerns workers who have chosen voluntarily to have a brain implant that separates their workplace selves from their outside identities, so neither has any knowledge or memory of the other. That’s one way to deal with the pain of abandoning a comfortable work-from-home routine.