What if workers were fully alienated from their labor? This is the question posed by severance, the titular procedure at the heart of the Apple TV+ hit, in which employees of the fictional corporate Lumon, divorced from their non-work selves, toil at meaningless labor in a basement-level prison. If the central metaphor of season one was that you cannot truly separate your self from your job, even with a bifurcated brain, season two tackles what happens after that knowledge becomes inescapable. Estrangement from the self must be addressed — and overcome.

The process of severance is posed as a solution to employees: Achieve work-life balance by not remembering your work day — literally leaving your job at the workplace doors (or elevators, as the case may be). But like every technological advancement flowing from corporations downward, this innovation doesn’t help workers so much as their bosses. Having no histories and context of the outer world to draw on, the severed employees of the Macrodata Refinement Division are easier to manipulate and abuse, and they don’t understand just how meaningless their work is. While the work may truly be important as well as mysterious, they’re just sorting scary numbers, utterly unaware of the point of their labor. This disaffection follows them home, exacerbated because of severance, not diminished. 

As season two expands to spend more time with the outies, a fuller picture emerges of how their severance affects them during what should be leisure time. Dylan (Zach Cherry), in particular, is a sobering case study: Despite his loving wife and three nice children, he’s chronically unhappy with his lot. For Irving B. (John Turturro), his outie’s activities remain the most opaque, but he seems to spend most of his time painting the same ominous scene of the Exports Hall, trying to recapture what he supposedly left at the office. Helly R. (Britt Lower), meanwhile, appears to have a more fulfilling life than her outie; Helena Eagan temporarily takes that life over, stealing the pleasure of Helly R.’s relationship with Mark S. (Adam Scott). She may be an Eagan, the company’s heir apparent, but the obscenely wealthy corporate class still suffers the effects of alienation — estrangement from their human nature.

Mark took the severed job in an attempt to forget about his dead wife, Gemma, for the duration of the workday, but that hasn’t appeared to translate into anything good for him. He drinks alone, he goes on bad dates, and every once in a while his well-meaning sister drags him to a dinner party he hates, where it’s just as likely that there’s nothing to eat. 

But the reason Mark underwent severance — Gemma — is also the reason he’s trying to un-sever himself. Having previously refused to engage with his innie’s plight, outie Mark is now undergoing “reintegration,” whereby Mark S. and Mark meld, so he can remember his experiences inside Lumon and save Gemma, who is trapped as the wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Reintegration becomes a metaphor: The work self has finally gotten through to the rest of you that conditions are in fact intolerable. And the worse the conditions, the greater the liberation of overcoming them. 

Reintegrating / The you you are  

“Rebellion,” wrote Albert Camus, “is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.” Mark S. has a kind of moxie lacking in his outie, born of his particularly unjust and incomprehensible condition. But Outie Mark’s slow dip into reintegration gives him some of his innie’s verve, as if the two selves reinforce each other’s chutzpah. By engaging with his work life, Outie Mark becomes more alive. 

In a throughline that began in the pilot’s foodless dinner scene, Mark is suddenly hungry all the time. His refrigerator is mostly empty except for bottles of beer and small jars of what appear to be a chicken soup Soylent product, drinks that teach their consumers to understand food as mere calories to be hastily consumed in pursuit of a more optimized life. Mark seems to have internalized this — until he’s in the throes of reintegration, and the chicken soup Soylent produces a grimace and a trip to a local Chinese restaurant, where he scarfs plate after plate of real food. The process of becoming his whole self is exhausting and requires sustenance, but this hunger — this pleasure in food — represents something larger.

Mark is becoming less optimized — less willing to understand himself as a product of efficiency. The forces of late capitalism would have us all self-optimize into an endless hustle culture of nonstop work, but food is one human pleasure that forces us to treat ourselves like the fleshy bodies we are, and meals require spending time in a space where opportunities may arise — in Mark’s case, a suspicious run-in with Helena Eagan that propels Mark onto the faster but harsher version of reintegration. 

Mark feeding his hunger, then, shows he’s less willing to contort himself, less willing to sacrifice the stuff of life to a productive scheme that teaches us to understand ourselves as workers at all times. 

The opposite of alienation / The we we are

Mark’s not-so-late wife, Gemma, engaged in this kind of nourishing activity. When he misses her particularly badly, Mark opens her box of crafting supplies, tucked away in the basement; we see a clumsy candle in Christmas red and green. Crafting “gave her time to think,” Mark explains, an activity falling outside productivity culture.  

This is the opposite of alienation. Karl Marx called it the life-being or the species-being, but today his wonky German translations are mostly distilled to “essence”: the idea of each human as part of humanity writ large, and the flourishing that comes when we individually and collectively organize our lives and selves outside of the products of capital. 

Work takes something from you, something intrinsic and literal, making you less. You can replenish this loss with pleasurable pursuits: For Marx, this meant eating, drinking, buying books, going to the theater or the pub, thinking, loving, theorizing, singing, painting … and the less you do of those things, the greater your capital. The essence of life, in other words, comes from pleasures and socializing, while the estrangement from our human nature comes not just from work, but from understanding ourselves as workers. 

Because work cannot be compartmentalized and cordoned off. If we’re divided from our work selves, we’re divided from ourselves. The path through this is one we must walk together. It’s no coincidence that the Macrodata Refinement Division’s big moment of dissent is a collective action born out of the individual paths of workplace radicalization (with the help of Mark’s brother-in-law’s self-help tome, The You You Are). Subjugation begins at work, but so does radicalization. As I’ve written previously, this is a lesson many workers who engage in collective action learn. We don’t go into work radicalized. We become radicalized at work, and even the smallest taste of collective action provides a potent sense of our power. 

Like reintegration, that power carries into life outside of our jobs, making us less willing to take bad situations from others who similarly seek to exploit us. This helps explain why the wealthiest and most powerful people fight unionization efforts so hard: Compliance at work doesn’t just keep workers under the thumbs of their bosses; it keeps extractive labor capitalism as the status quo. The workplace is at the heart of alienation because it’s where we learn to be subjected — to understand ourselves as literal subjects. When we accept that our livelihoods exist by the unfathomable whims of a C-suite, we’re more likely to understand ourselves as similarly passive within other unequal dynamics, be it landlords raising rent just because they can or divestment in public education leading to life under insurmountable student loan debt. And when workers call bullshit on the conditions of work, it’s not too long before they challenge the very nature of the work itself — and the way its ethos spreads its tendrils into all aspects of life. 

You don’t have to watch a science-fiction show like Severance to understand that the workplace is the central site of all that is soul-crushing and spiritually immiserating in life — you just have to go to work. The opposite is true, too. Engaging in the simple pursuits that give texture to life — eating real food, engaging in nonproductive hobbies like crafting, socializing with people you love — replenish the soul, acting as a counterbalance to the estrangement of the workplace. Fully realizing the self is nearly as hard in our real world as it is in the grimly fantastical world of Lumon Industries, even if going to town on a bowl of wonton soup isn’t quite as revolutionary an act. Here and there, reintegration into the whole self brings with it a potent sense of self-determination, joy, and power. A taste of that makes us hungry for more. 

If you’re a regular on TikTok or Instagram, you may feel your kitchen is under attack.

It started with #CleanTok, wherein cleanliness influencers shared tips for sparkling stainless steel sinks and competed to have the most hygienic kitchen. Then, influencers got more ambitious with “decanting” videos documenting a method of pantry organization involving transferring foodstuffs from the grocery store packaging to clear containers in neat rows. 

Now it’s “fridgescaping.” This is roughly what it sounds like: The interiors of refrigerators are organized and decorated, with the most popular posts of the genre featuring fridges that look less like cold storage and more like a bohemian fairy garden. Milk goes in farmhouse pitchers, eggs line up ceramic trays, and butter hides under dishes shaped like animals. Berries, ever ubiquitous, are placed attractively in vintage bowls, raw vegetables stand at attention, and items that have no place in a fridge — bouquets of flowers, photos in frames, string lights — are given prominent placement. That the refrigerators are meticulously clean is a given, and they’re often new and large. 

In a trend piece, the New York Times declared “[N]ot even the inside of your fridge is safe from decorating.” It reports on fridgescaping as a “creative outlet” for some and, according to one influencer, a means to make food “more accessible” to her three young children. Another tells the Times that spending three hours on a forest-themed fridge is worth it because she is “more excited” to eat her produce. 

As someone with a cooking background — my father has been a chef for 35 years, my mother’s side of the family runs a spice business, and I grew up running around commercial kitchens and worked for a year as a line cook, in addition to writing a book on spices — I find myself deeply disturbed by fridgescaping. It is, I believe, the culmination of a series of trends that serve to alienate people from food. It removes all the labor, the mess, the physicality, and the pleasure inherent in eating, and replaces it with public performance. There are better ways to organize a kitchen, techniques that can improve functionality and prioritize goals like reducing food waste — and, yes, that could even lead to eating more fruits and vegetables.

The rise of fridgescaping

Cooking at home for the majority of us not wealthy enough to outsource it requires an immense amount of time and labor: coming up with a meal plan, making a list, going to the store, shopping, unloading, chopping, sautéing, simmering, and doing the dishes after. This is out of reach for millions of Americans experiencing food insecurity, the many millions more living with low food security, or those who simply don’t have enough hours in the day.  

Given that reality, it’s hard to fathom that influencers are meticulously creating a Hobbit-inspired fridgescape and buying so much produce that their fridge looks like a Dutch Golden Age still life. It goes without saying that fridgescaping — and its pantry cousin, decanting — prioritizes displaying and arranging food, instead of preparing and eating it. That’s not to mention all the unnecessary aesthetic upkeep, like changing out the water of that bouquet. Imagine doing all that and also recording yourself doing it, then sitting down to edit the footage.

That is to say: Fridgescaping is a scam of the classic keeping-up-with-the-Joneses variety for the TikTok age. In these clips, hours of labor are squeezed into 30 seconds of beautification, following the before-and-after formula so successful on social media. These videos suggest you too can have the beauty and bounty of a fridge decked out Bridgerton style if you purchase the additional storage and knickknacks. Conveniently, you can click a link and buy everything you see from the influencer’s online store, where they receive a cut. Plenty of rationalizations exist (the produce!) but they’re undercut when those same creators urge their followers to “shop my fridge!” 

“It’s very easy to connect any capitalist endeavor to food,” said Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and co-editor of Food Instagram, “because it’s something we have to do to survive — but it’s also something we genuinely want to do because it’s pleasurable, and doing it with other people, eating it with other people, preparing it with other people can also bring such profound pleasure.” 

Add in the gendered expectations around food preparation and cleaning, and fridgescaping can be seen as yet another domestic task expected of women: to not only shop, cook, and clean the kitchen, but to make it all look beautiful, too. 

Your kitchen should be a space of purpose, not just aesthetics

I no longer cook professionally, but as a regular working person who cooks daily in a well-functioning home kitchen with an average amount of storage space, I have good news: You don’t need to live a life of ample wealth and leisure to smartly organize your kitchen. There are free or very cheap ways to do it with function in mind, without totally sacrificing aesthetics (although you won’t be needing fairy lights anytime soon). 

I consulted with the chefs in my life — my dad Brian Moog, and my brother-in-law Justin Behlke — for their practical advice on making the best use of your own time, space, and labor — and, as an avid home cook, added some tried-and-true tips of my own. 

Make your produce last much longer

You should store most fresh produce in the refrigerator to maximize lifespan and give space and air to anything that’s packed tightly together to help it stay good for longer — I guess you’d call that a kind of decanting. 

“You can look at how they’re storing produce in the store,” my dad said. “If they’re storing something in water, like asparagus, you can do that at home too.” In addition to freeing the asparagus from their rubber band, he cuts the bottom of the stems, like flowers, and puts them in half an inch of water in a deli container in the fridge, where they last up to 10 days. 

He also removes lettuces and pre-cut greens from bags and clamshells and places them in airtight containers with paper towels at the bottom and top. Raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries are likewise placed in a single layer on a piece of paper towel in airtight containers. Heads of lettuce, kale, herbs, and scallions can be simply wrapped in dry paper towels to achieve similar results.  

For my dad and brother-in-law, paper towels are the secret weapon to keeping produce fresh. As fruits and lettuces spend time in the fridge, moisture leaks out, which condenses and leads to the foods going bad faster. You want paper towels to absorb that excess. “The amount of paper towels I use …” Justin said. “There are all sorts of specialty containers, but usually those specific things are marketing gimmicks.” (For those who want a reusable option, try plain cotton or linen napkins to achieve a similar keep-fresh effect.)

So don’t be ashamed of paper towel use. “There’s a lot of value in paper towels,” Justin said. “There’s balance to keep in mind, but there’s a lot of practicality.”

Flour is the only dry good he puts in a plastic container, with a lid that’s easy to get off and an opening wide enough to dip a measuring cup into — mostly because flour bags create a mess every time they’re opened. “Keeping yourself and the cooking area clean saves time,” he said. “It seems nominal but it adds up.” That’s the kind of practical consideration you should keep in mind as you’re making your own kitchen decisions.

I also recommend putting brown sugar in an air-tight container. After years of gouging it, rock-hard, from the bag, I can pop off the lid and scoop soft, moist sugar. 

Keep perishables front and center

Fridgescaping influencers talk a lot about how their methods help them keep track of their produce, but a few simpler methods achieve the same results. 

It’s true that “out of sight, out of mind” is a cursed reality when it comes to perishables in the fridge, so keep short shelf life items at the front. 

I don’t use the crisper drawers for fruits and veggies. I put condiments in one and, being a Wisconsinite, cheese in the other. I know certain produce lasts longer in the crisper drawers, but all that meant for me was produce languishing there for a few extra days because I’d forget about it. 

Similarly, if your household consumes meat, try putting it in a see-through plastic container at the front. This keeps it front of mind and cordons it off from other food.

The real key to my family’s approach to reducing food waste is the use of a whiteboard on the fridge, where we note the meals we’ve bought ingredients for. Seeing those meals listed reminds us about the foods likely to go bad fastest, so we cook those first. 

We also keep a running shopping list on a second whiteboard. Whenever we’re low or out of something, we add it to the list, so by the time we’re going shopping we’re not trying to remember everything we need. 

You don’t need to buy expensive plastic “storage systems”

You don’t need professional-grade equipment or specialty gadgets, but professional-grade storage is key. For a lot of chefs, this means deli containers and cambros.

Delis are round plastic storage containers most commonly used in 32-ounce, 16-ounce, and 8-ounce sizes. They stack in the cupboard, saving room, but also when used in the fridge, freezer, or pantry, regardless of which size you’re using. They’re a staple in restaurant kitchens, and they’re cheap and sturdy.

Cambros are larger containers made of thick, sturdy plastic with tough lids. A couple of these live on top of our fridge, and we pull them down to use as a mixing bowl, to make dough, and to cook big batches of food. The square cambros are ideal for storing large-batch leftovers, prepped ingredients (like chopped onions and carrots), and soups, they take up just as much room as a mixing bowl but because of their square shape they fit more efficiently and stack more readily. 

Use tape to label the food in the delis and cambros (no, you don’t need to cut it with scissors like they do on The Bear). Noting the date something was made can come in handy in both the short and long term. A “made on” date attached to leftovers containing meat, for example, is helpful when deciding whether to dig back in after a few days. And for items that won’t spoil, like syrups or caramel, it’s helpful when clearing out the fridge to realize which products have been occupying valuable real estate for six months without being used. 

For pantry organization, try recycling old containers or using what you have instead of buying new ones. For instance, I use my loaf tins for granola bars and baby crackers on a pantry shelf to make the packages more accessible. 

I don’t buy the idea that putting everything in clear plastic containers is helpful. I know how much cereal is left in the box every time I pour it into a bowl; I know how much mustard is left each time I squirt it out. When I notice them running low, I add them to the running grocery list. 

Kitchen organization is a process, not a one-off event

My dad and Justin both say that organizing a kitchen is less an exercise in perfection and more about refining as you go along. “My biggest piece of advice is to remain conscious,” my dad told me. “I’ve set up a lot of kitchens, and I see the angst of it. People want to be able to move into a new space and put every item in the best place, but that’s just not realistic.”

Don’t worry about finding the right spot for each and every item. Know that you’ll figure it out with an open mind combined with time spent in the kitchen. “It takes time. It takes trial and error,” my dad told me. “You just need to exist in your kitchen space for a while before you set it up perfectly.”

My dad is still fine-tuning his own organizational scheme. He recently realized pasta rollers were taking up a prime spot in a drawer when he hadn’t made pasta from scratch in two years. “It’s time to go to the basement,” he said. 

“One day you’ll realize, ‘this just doesn’t work here,’ and you’ll move it to the right spot,” said Justin. 

A kitchen is a living and ripening room. Not only will items gravitate to the correct spots, but those spots will likely evolve. Farmers market hauls in the summer require a different setup than cookie-baking season in the winter, and that’s to say nothing of new functions needed in a kitchen when a baby is born or a new roommate moves in. Even when you’ve achieved a well-functioning kitchen, it’s helpful to internalize Heraclitus’s adage that the only constant in life is change. “It’s a mindset,” my dad said. Somebody just needs to tell the fridgescapers.

You may not have heard, but people don’t like their jobs. 

Americans are quitting in droves. Companies paying poverty wages are having a hard time finding and retaining workers. Highly paid digital workers don’t want to return to the office. The pandemic stripped the padding that made white-collar jobs bearable — lunches with coworkers, Starbucks runs, breaks in fresh air — leaving only the rotten core of actual work behind.

Setting aside generalities, consider your own work. Does it suck? Is it exhausting? Is it meaningful? Or does it detract from the parts of your life that bring meaning? Do you have a good job, or is it only good compared to the worse jobs you could be forced into? 

Enter Severance, a show on Apple TV+ starring Adam Scott as Mark. Mark has voluntarily undergone a procedure known as severance, which means he has chosen not to remember what happens during his workday. It’s an intoxicating premise. If you were paid handsomely to do it, why wouldn’t you?

Mark works at Lumon, a powerful corporation with mysterious intent and one of the most ghoulish dystopian settings on the small screen. Lumon offers the most in-demand perk of all: work-life balance. His job self, his “innie,” spends his days sorting and filing numbers in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Division, for no reason that he knows of. His “outtie” is blissfully unaware of the pointlessness of his innie’s days, though the complete removal from work hasn’t exactly translated into happiness for Mark. (Spoilers follow for Severance.)

Mark and his severed coworkers make an ideal workforce to be exploited. With no personal memories and no context of the outside world, attempts to understand their jobs and surroundings are childlike and naive. But Lumon can’t stop coworkers from caring about each other: Mark empathizes with new hire Helly (Britt Lower); Irving (John Turturro) falls in love with Burt (Christopher Walken) from Optics and Design, abandoning his zealotry for the Handbook in the process; Dylan (Zach Cherry) accidentally discovers his outtie’s fatherhood, radicalizing him to help his coworkers escape instead of working late to win chintzy prizes.

Severance is a sneaky paean to worker solidarity, and the heart of the show is a metaphor for how workers come together in the face of oppression. Mark’s compliance is first shaken by the expulsion of his work bestie, Petey (Yul Vazquez). The loss awakens a quiet recalcitrance because that’s what makes work palatable: Your coworkers become your friends and, given enough trauma bonding, your comrades. 

While the workplace sitcom has been a staple of TV for decades, no show about work has captured quite so accurately how damaging work can be in real life. You don’t work at the Cheers bar, and you don’t work for Leslie Knope. You are not Jim Halpert; most likely, you are Stanley Hudson, painfully aware of the stupidity of your labor. 

Lumon may represent a particularly hellish version of the office, but it doesn’t have to stray far from reality to depict the cruelty of work. The workplace is already dystopian. Entire sectors of the economy are based on a large pool of low-wage workers, aided by state governments run in large part by business owners. In America, 44 percent of workers — 53 million people — work in low-wage jobs that are physically exhausting and arduous. Semi-employed gig workers live precariously while their employers fight tooth and nail so they won’t be classified as their employees. Better-off white-collar workers face their own set of harms. Like the members of the Macrodata Refinement Division, we’re all dealing with hardship, some of which is the direct result of our jobs.

Because as we know in our bones and Severance makes clear, we are our jobs, every shitty minute. We speak of “work-life balance” because we know work is opposed to life. When Mark tells Helly he just hopes he has things he cares about outside of Lumon, it’s because he knows his job is not one of those things. For all the fantastical elements in Severance, the only real science fiction is the consciousness-searing technology facilitating ever-greater worker compliance. The suffering at work, and the characters’ futile attempts to separate work from everything else, is the lived reality of millions of us in the real world.

The pandemic only highlighted the brutality of our jobs in the current extractive labor setup we call a capitalist democracy. We learned that we’re either essential or not. Unless you’re a doctor, “essential” mostly means people working in low-wage, dangerous, punishing jobs necessary to keep the economy going, like farmworkers, bus drivers, and cashiers. There seems to be a direct correlation between how necessary your job is and how low you are paid and indecently you are treated. 

On the flip side are those working inessential jobs, or what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” Graeber writes in his essay. Macrodata Refinement is a perfect example of a job that doesn’t really need to be done, and one brought about by Severance creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson’s real-life temp job entering data.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Erickson was able to make a show out of the “profound psychological violence” (Graeber’s words) of a meaningless job, or that that show could double as an ingenious depiction of workplace organizing. TV workers are part of a formidable union with a history of militancy that brings strong protections. (TV writers are represented by the Writers Guild of America West; as an editorial employee of Vox, I’m represented by their sibling, Writers Guild of America East.) There’s a reason the saying “an injury to one is an injury to all” has stuck around in the labor world, and Hollywood writers are especially good at using their collective power to secure better conditions for everyone in their industry.

In an interview with Inverse, Erickson states the themes of his show bluntly: “It’s about workers reclaiming power, which is obviously a brutal, ongoing human struggle. Workers are extremely powerful, but I think solidarity is one of the biggest challenges in that, especially when those in power try to divide in the ranks.” The best that can be said of the vast majority of jobs is that you may come to prioritize the value of your coworkers over the circumstances that brought you together, i.e., the meaninglessness of your shared toil. Severance is a road map of organizing, a revolution in progress, and it begins and ends with caring about your fellow worker, who in turn cares about you. 

In Severance, Helly, newly severed and rebellious, represents the audience surrogate and an unadulterated reaction to all this, and perhaps what everyone’s reaction should be to spending their days doing pointless tasks for the profit of others: rage, repulsion, and determination to escape. Those are the seeds of worker organizing. People know their jobs are bad; it takes someone like Helly, or organizers who won the recent union drive at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York warehouse, to light a fire under their immiserated coworkers in order to do something about it. 

The stakes are high for workers. While Jeff Bezos’s wealth is greater than the GDPs of more than half the world’s countries, employment at his company is so precarious and difficult that the high turnover rate is a feature of employment; routine injuries are a feature of employment; peeing in bottles is a feature of employment. “You’re not a person” — the message Helly’s outtie tells her innie — brutally epitomizes the loss of dignity and humanity we endure in the workplace.

A union cannot solve every problem workers face, but it wins us a seat at the table to determine at least some of the conditions of our working lives. I know this because I’ve organized a workplace. It was the single most meaningful thing I’ve done in my life because it led me to understand my power when working collectively with my coworkers, and because it materially improved the lives of many of us. 

Media isn’t the only white-collar industry where unions are booming: Workers at nonprofits, museums, and even Big Tech are revolting against the norms that use their own drives against them. It’s much easier to get people to work long hours if you teach them they’re choosing to do it.

Similarly, Lumon gets workers to exploit themselves. They choose to undergo severance — if they don’t like it, they can quit! If there’s a lesson here, it’s that owners will do everything they possibly can to extract as much surplus value from workers as possible — especially under the guise of technological advances — and it’s up to the workers to stop it. The severance procedure is a funhouse mirror version of the ways real executives use technology to make work ever more dehumanizing in pursuit of ever-greater profits. At least on the severed floor, there’s hope, because even devoid of the context of the outside world and their personal histories, even without knowing what a union is, the workers still rebel.  

We cannot ignore what happens to us at work, even if we’d like to, and even if our overseers do their best to facilitate the idea that our work lives are separate from the rest of our lives. “No one should be as invested in their boss’s bottom line as they are in their own life or happiness,” showrunner Erickson said in the Inverse interview. “But there are certain things we learn as humans, like empathy and self-worth, that I think we’re often discouraged from bringing to the workplace, to our own detriment. The less of ourselves we bring to work, the easier we are to exploit, or roped into immoral practices. But also we need that separation in order not to lose ourselves entirely.”

The benefit of exploring a topic like workplace organizing in a sci-fi story like Severance is that its outlandish premise allows its viewers some remove from the cultural baggage we see as entrenched and unchangeable. It’s a narrative that puts the brutality of work front and center, and through stories, we can learn that what seems impossible is not. Even in the most dystopian version of corpocratic America imaginable, workplace empathy and uniting in our common struggle triumphs.