What to Do If ‘Severance’ Feels a Little Too Real

BEFORE COVID CAME and weirded out the world, a job was something you went to. Five days a week, eight hours a day. Frequently in an office with watercoolers and plants and those strange triangular phones in conference rooms. Work was work, life was life. Then bam! We underwent the most revolutionary change in workplace culture in at least a generation. The lucky ones who could do so worked from home, choosing when, where, and how—unlike workers in the Apple TV+ series Severance, who have no awareness of one part of their life when they’re in the other.

IRL, work became life, life became work. Everything got scrambled. Whereas once work and life felt like counterweights that were meant to be balanced, the two are now so fragmented that the setup is more like a jigsaw puzzle. Today, as more and more businesses are summoning their workers back to the office, finding the before-times balance is futile. It’s time to build a better fit. Here’s how, according to work-life experts—and Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance himself:

Dissolve the Dichotomy

“Work-life balance” rolls off the tongue. It should. We’ve been saying it for the past 40 years. Except we have the phrasing all wrong. “It isn’t work-life,” says Bill Burnett, cofounder and executive director of Stanford’s Life Design Lab and coauthor of Designing Your New Work Life. “It’s life-life. The goal should be ‘life with a good job in it.’ ” Burnett says we should “come into coherence.” First, he suggests, write a shortish statement on what work means to you and what you’re looking for from it. Money? Satisfaction? Meaning? Then write a second statement about how you see your life: what you value, where relationships fit in, and how spirituality plays a part, if any. If the first statement fits inside the second, you’re in coherence. If not, start making choices that bring you into alignment (for instance, changing your schedule so you can get to more soccer games if you value family).

Retire Pseudo-Productivity

The siren call of Slack. The unread email that sits like a burning ember in your inbox. The lure of work can feel inescapable. But are you really doing anything by responding? Often not. Pseudo-productivity—the idea, according to writer Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email, that “visible busyness is a proxy that we’re doing something useful”—is not novel. But now that we’re always reachable, pseudo-productivity has chased us into our homes. Issues arise in this intersection of pseudo-productivity and all the devices that let us stay connected to work, cautions Newport. “Once work could follow us everywhere, you have the ability at every moment of demonstrating activity.”

Instead of using activity as a metric, he recommends a result-driven approach. Get more results in less time by waiting until you finish something before turning your attention to something new, he suggests. “If possible, move more conversations from drawn-out email threads or interruptive Slack chats into prescheduled office hours, where you can efficiently dispatch multiple issues all at once.”

Diversify your Identity

Finding a work-life fit is impossible if you are what you do. “Over the last few decades, there’s been a decline of things like organized religion and community groups that once provided meaning, identity, and purpose,” explains writer and workplace expert Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job. “As those institutions have disintegrated, many people have turned toward their jobs for identity.” By investing so much in our work identities, says Stolzoff, we neglect to invest in our other identities. “We are more than just workers. We are friends, parents, neighbors, travelers, citizens, artists, etc.” Interestingly, he notes, research shows that workers with greater self-complexity tend to be more resilient in the face of stressful events. That can help them be better workers, too. So Stolzoff recommends treating your personal identity just as you would your job. “Each of those identities requires our time and attention,” he says. “Think of them as investments.”

Find Moments of Choice

Even if you are living in your own Severance reality, Burnett recommends clawing back some autonomy any way you can. “What makes us feel human is our ability to choose. So even within your work life, finding moments where you can exercise choice helps make you feel that you are reclaiming your humanity,” he says. You might not win the war, but you can definitely pick your battles, whether that means taking a five-minute break every hour to get up and stretch, engaging your boss about redesigning your job description around your strengths, or turning a hobby into a side hustle.

Explore Whether Work Is an Excuse

An estimated one-third of Americans consider themselves workaholics, which means that even if a healthier mix of personal and professional were offered to them, they’d likely opt for the office. And while it is true, according to psychiatrist and MH advisor Gregory Scott Brown, MD, that work can provide a much-needed dopamine rush, “work addiction is just like any other addiction. It’s not good for your physical or mental health.”

Until the underlying problems bedeviling your personal life—the so-called push factors—are addressed, work will continue to be where you go to avoid them. “Imagine being in a bad relationship with issues you need to address, and the only area in your life where you feel validated is at the office,” he says. Noticing that you’re self-medicating with work is an opportunity to address the issues at hand. That not only helps your personal life but also helps you enter work with more clarity and purpose.

How the Creator of ‘Severance’ Manages the Whole Work-Life Thing

Who better to ask about work-life fit than Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance—where work you and life you never meet? Here’s how it’s going for him.

IT’S A VERY all-consuming [job] and, at times, can feel like an addiction. You reach a certain point where you are so used to having to be engaged with this thing all the time that the absence of it starts to make you anxious. So it’s still very much an open question for me of how you reconcile that in a healthy way.

Honestly, a big part of what’s made it work for me has been the work family that has emerged. In the show, you see that inside the machine, there are other people like you who are going through a lot of the same struggles and who you can talk to about it. It’s the villain in the show, Harmony Cobel, who says the line “You know what makes the difference? The people.” There is a kernel of truth in that. Even though on Severance this idea of a work family gets kind of turned around and used to subjugate people, I’ve come to really love a lot of the people who work on the show and find a lot of salvation in talking to them. We always need to be looking for those things that remind us that we’re human beings, and I’ve found a lot of that through the people I work with, and I’m really grateful for it.

Prop styling by JJ Chan / B&A.