How Severance Addresses the Mental Toll of Corporate Apathy and Exploitation

Note: This article discusses events that have happened through Episode 8.

Every time Mark rides the elevator to the severance floor of Lumon Industries, a chip in his bifurcated brain is activated and every memory of life outside his work disappears, leaving him with only those he forms during office hours. When he leaves at the end of the day, he’ll regain access to his exterior memories, but retain nothing of the past eight hours. It sounds grim and dehumanizing, a perverse work-life balance where one part of you is only allowed to experience work and nothing of home can infect the sterile workplace—and that’s because it is.

Mark and the other members of his Macrodata Refinement department are deeply indoctrinated, hesitant to question the stringent workplace policies, and happy to chase meaningless, ephemeral incentives (finger traps, dance breaks, the ever-so-enticing melon party). They refer to themselves with subjugating language; at work they are “innies”, subservient to the desires of the more authoritative, exciting “outies”. The fact that they never question the conditions of their labor is probably why they’re so revolted by new hire Helly lambasting everything about their jobs.

Isolated and confined even in her own four-person department, Helly concocts increasingly drastic ways of leaving the severance floor, assuming her outie will listen to her innie’s cries for help. She doesn’t. Over videotape, Helly is told—by herself—that she is not a person. It’s important that such dehumanization is coming from her own mouth, as it allows corporate ideology to be disguised through a personal, targeted mouthpiece. This is despite, as hinted in the recent episode, Helly’s outie is likely to be a benefactor of the severance program and involved in its expansion, which only adds to her cruelty, as she doesn’t see a low-level worker as worthy of the barest respect even though it’s literally herself. Personhood has been weaponized; Lumon lets you tell yourself you’re worthless, because that way it sounds more real.

As we explore other characters, a pattern in Lumon’s hiring practices coalesces. We meet Mark when he is crying in his car outside work, still grieving his wife who died in a fatal car accident some time before. He opted for severance because he wanted eight hours a day where he could escape his loss. It’s a short-sighted solution (you’re not going to heal by severing all connection with the version of you in pain), but Lumon isn’t interested in dissuading him; rather, they’re happy to take advantage of people looking for myopic solutions to deep-set emotional issues.

The answer to the mystery of what severance is used for is probably depressingly simple; it makes people work better. What’s more unsettling is how Lumon misleads its workers into thinking this is for their own benefit, resulting in a compounding of hostility and a universal worsening of wellbeing. But most distressing is that, when characters on the severance floor threaten to snap, Lumon tries to retroactively and ineffectually contain problems it was responsible for causing.

Because when she leaves work in the elevator one day, Helly tries to hang herself—and the first thing her outie wakes up to is self-inflicted suffocation.

I recently attended a work-mandated mental health awareness workshop, and I hated every minute of it. There were several red flags; it was said mental wellbeing was important to maintain productivity, the responsibility for helping those struggling was shifted to fellow employees, and there was little to no understanding of how nuanced the toxicity of work culture can be. But most egregiously, nothing suggested how things could actually, tangibly change. Everything said was flimsily reactive.

Maybe I took umbrage so fervently because as a mentally-ill socialist, and as someone who has cried in nearly every bathroom accessible to me at work, I’m invested in employers not screwing over vulnerable people. There exist real, genuine solutions to improve working environments: trialing a four-day week, providing extensive training to HR employees, hiring onsite counselors. But these all cost money. It would be much easier to do a perfunctory “awareness” workshop so a box can be ticked that demonstrates how seriously a company takes an issue they have no interest in solving. Because what’s the point in talking to HR or the endless recitation of, “It’s okay not to feel okay” when work is the thing making you feel worse?