Nora Yoon ’27 is a Chemistry major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Cue the ominous shot of Earl Gregg Swem Library, and an impassive student walking in and ascending the stairs to the second floor. There, light-green signs and fluorescent lights dominate the rows of computers and condensed bookshelves. Not a word is said from the moment this student enters to the moment they sit down at the double-monitors, signing in to their wm login with a woeful sigh.
Such is the scene in my head as I prepare myself for a long night of watching YouTube videos to recover from deficits in my professor’s teaching ability (or my attention span — who’s to say?). All that really matters at this moment is that my first exam for biochemistry is tomorrow. The outside world, the joy of seeing my family, watching the warm spring sunlight enrich the vibrant colors of campus — all these things tug at my heartstrings, deep, deep below the harsh necessity of memorizing the amino acids and knowing what a pKa is.
The soundless air absorbs my misery as I whimper, drawing arginine incorrectly for the third time. Is it nonpolar? I don’t think so. So it’s polar, but acidic, basic, neutral? With a timorous heart, I swallow my despair and look it up: basic.
I gaze outside the window with a feeling of pure futility. A wide river of grief flows through me as time passes in the beautiful, shining world, eternally separated from me by a pane of glass. Surely there must be a better way, an escape from this torturous fate.
Why have I not studied before now? I have so many critical things in my life that I must do before I can study: books to read in order to avoid doing work, friends to talk with in order to avoid doing work and TV shows to watch in order to avoid doing work — in particular, the ongoing second season of “Severance.”
Hopefully you are at least familiar with the premise of “Severance.” In the show, people can separate their memories and sense of self from when they are at work versus in their personal lives, essentially becoming two distinct people: their innie, with the responsibility of work, and their outie, free to enjoy that work’s benefits. Okay, that sounds pretty cool: half of me gets to do mysterious work in a completely focused environment, while the rest gets to enjoy my passions without the weight of assignments looming over me.
WRONG! In the first episode, Helly R., maybe the most likable and interesting television character of all time, asks her boss on the severed floor if they’re in hell after she repeatedly attempts (and fails) to leave. Though he assures her that they’re not, there is a depressing eeriness to their nonsensical work: sorting numbers based on what emotions they evoke, all for rewards such as stickers, finger traps or, once a financial quarter, a pancake party. To sever the part of yourself that does work from the part of you that supposedly enjoys your life would fail to actually increase the quality of your life; as Shakespeare wrote in “Henry IV Part I,” “If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work.”
And none of the severed employees are actually particularly happy in their outside life. One is a grieving alcoholic. Another is chronically aimless, haphazardly trying to find his passion in life, and another is obsessed with the company that he works for. Though the severed workers enjoy high pay for their (or rather, their innie’s) work, this huge gap in the total experience of their life only leads them into greater pits of unhappiness. Though we don’t always see the logic of why we have to study for this test, write this paper, etc., at the end of the day, we can choose to select certain responsibilities and oblige ourselves to work toward them. The outies of severed workers experience no professional productivity at all, creating an imbalance that leads their lives to be largely unrewarding and purposeless. The innies of severed workers experience total productivity, but the end product of their work is totally unknown and potentially murderous. Furthermore, no aspect of their work is in their control, since their outies condemned them to eternally work for the whims of an insidious corporation.
Though most of the innies eventually accept their fate in the liminal white hallways and corporate colors of the severed work floor, Helly R. unfailingly refuses to accept the conditions of her existence. When her outie declines her resignation attempt and derides her for wanting to leave (going as far as to say “I am a person. You are not,”), Helly works through the rest of the day with a smile, and then, at the end of the day, she promptly attempts to hang herself in the elevator, leaving her outie to wake up choking on an extension cord.
Using your energy for the work that you deem meaningful is tantamount to living a life that you actually want to live. While this responsibility can feel overwhelming to certain obsessive neurotics (definitely not me), it really is a gift to have agency in life, and a little silly to realize the lengths we go to in order to avoid confronting that responsibility. “Severance” is just an extreme example of a pretty common phenomenon.
We are not two people living in one body: a worker and an enjoyer, an innie and outie. The person who does work should do it as conscientiously and freely as the person who does more leisurely activities for enjoyment. Rest, work; neither of these alone make for a rewarding life: hence the innies and outies of “Severance” are both immensely dissatisfied. Watching the Lumon employees dissociate between two people, I was reminded of my freshman year, coming home and feeling like I could catch a breath and enjoy myself, and returning to school, where I felt obligated to accomplish as much as possible as quickly as possible. But eventually, the pressure to enjoy being home made me resent being unable to do anything productive there, and the pressure to be productive at school became so overbearing that I burned out completely.
This year, I’m learning to study at more regular intervals, and surprise! The work pays off. I feel prepared for exams, especially because I know that I chose to do the work that leads to the end result. And I’m relearning that, of course, the process of understanding can be difficult and arduous — that’s what makes the comprehension worth something. And when I’m just relaxing, reading books or catching up on shows, I know that my desire to be productive has a concrete place in my life as well. While severing myself would definitely be tempting, I think that the agency that severed workers signed away to a corporation makes for that quality of your life where meaning makes itself. It’s so easy to frantically relieve yourself of this responsibility to live life on your terms: by falling in love with someone you barely know, doomscrolling in bed for hours, playing too much minecraft or, in “Severance”, by literally sealing consciousness off from your workday. But in the end you’re just wasting time, trying to escape the fact of your own life.
To bring in a final example to make my point, I present “Candide” by Voltaire (which I will be writing a longer piece on later!). After the main characters begin living in a peaceful garden after enduring slavery, attempted hangings and more, a philosopher tells Candide that getting the opportunity to survive and live to this stage of their story is proof of his original claim: that the universe is necessarily the best of all worlds. To which Candide succinctly replies, “That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden.” Sometimes you gotta just shut up and commit yourself to some work — as someone who tends to wander in the abstract, this advice has been more helpful than any poetry or spiritual works that I tried to derive purpose from last year. No matter how good something seems in theory, it doesn’t beat the actual experience of accomplishment. “Severance” is a good reminder of why taking away the opportunity for that choice is so devastating — and why it’s sort of comforting to know that I get to be both the Lumon Corporation and severed worker in my life, making the mysterious work for myself.
