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.