Severance and the Religion of Work
Along with driving the speed limit, Formula 1 spies, and why you buy stuff you don't need
In this newsletter, I discuss the Apple TV Plus show, Severance. There will be **mild spoilers,** so if you haven’t yet had a chance to watch it, you’ve been warned. It’s a TV-MA show, mostly for language (and disturbing office parties). Letting you know just in case that’s not your cup of tea. The article will still be intelligible if you’ve never seen the show and have no plans to watch it.
Also, I promised that I would write up some more thoughts about the Mandalorian after the current season ended. If you’d like to read some spoiler-filled thoughts, they’re at the bottom of the newsletter.
Yes, I’m writing about a show that came out a year ago, but Severance is not just any show. It’s perhaps the best single season of TV from start to finish that I’ve ever watched. Thrilling, mysterious, and weird. (What’s the deal with the goats, man?) And the themes have been rolling around in my brain for the past year.
One of the questions Severance seems to be asking is, “What does it mean to be human?” Are we just machines? Just reducible down to our function? With parts that can be replaced? And the difficult bits sequestered? Or is our quest to be mechanized part of us fleeing from what makes us human?
Mark (played by Adam Scott), is severed, which in the universe of the show Severance means that he has voluntarily undergone a procedure that severs his non-work consciousness from his work consciousness. That’s some serious work-life balance. Whenever Mark descends the elevator down to his office, something switches in his brain and a new consciousness takes over—his work self. It’s like switching users on your Netflix account. The “Innies” (the personalities inside the office) don’t know almost anything about their “Outies,” not even what their hobbies are or if they have a family. The Innies only know what they have experienced in the office. It’s a complete severance between your work self and your home self.
What kind of person would undergo such a dramatic procedure? And also, what sort of company would offer such a thing to its employees? (Mild spoilers below.)
The company is Lumon Industries. It’s some sort of medical technology company that embodies all the creepiest authoritarian parts of the real Silicon Valley. There’s a religious fervor that surrounds its founder, Kier Eagan (the fictional town in which the company headquarters resides is even named after him). One non-severed employee has a shrine in her house dedicated to the man. In Lumon’s headquarters is a museum that houses items from its past (almost like holy relics) and displays wax models of the current and former leaders of the company (showing something like papal succession). The company has an employee handbook written by Kier that functions like scripture, songs that function like hymns, sayings that function like liturgy, and core principles that function like the Christian virtues. Myths about Kier’s life are recounted over and over again to place the employees in the larger story that Lumon is telling about itself and the world. The worship, the blind loyalty, and the devotion are all very remarkable…and very bizarre. But that’s the point.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think there has been a single display of what we would traditionally call “religion” in the show—nothing Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or otherwise. The only religion that is left in Severance’s world is the worship of an entrepreneur and the corporation he established. On this rock, I will build my business. It’s the religion of work.
The Religion of Work
Yes, this is a sci-fi-ish show and its depictions are exaggerated on purpose, but when you compare the religiosity of Lumon to what we see with companies in the real world, it’s hard not to notice some parallels. Think about the excitement over Apple or Tesla and their leaders. Google and Meta creating commune-like campuses for their employees. People are told they can make a difference in the world at this company and that they can find their true calling there. Companies use language like “We’re a family here” (except in this family you can get fired and lose your health insurance if you don’t perform well enough).
Every religion has its saints and clergy. We have entrepreneurs and influencers.
And it’s probably no coincidence that the rise of work as religion has coincided with the fall of traditional religious observance. Religion used to be the thing that gave us meaning. It used to be that the greater things outside of ourselves like family, community, and faith tied us to the world and gave us our purpose and drive for life. It was all communal and corporate (not in a company sense but in a body of people sense). But in our individualistic age, we’ve been told that it’s up to us to make our own meaning now. You must decide what your purpose is. The older things have been pushed aside to make way for personal autonomy.
It’s only natural that our jobs would replace the hole left by religion. It takes up a massive portion of our time. If you’re lucky, your work can earn you great wealth and influence. And it’s the thing that we do with our own two hands. So, if I create my own meaning, then what I work on should be a natural extension of that. It’s a part of my identity now.
The problem is that work and achievement cannot give you what you seek from it. Like any false god, it takes more than it gives.
The Achievement Society
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his book, The Burnout Society, that we live in an “achievement society,” meaning that we live in a culture where we create meaning for our lives through our achievements. Now, this can take its form in many different ways. There’s the standard achievement of working your way up the corporate ladder and getting that sweet corner office and a six-figure salary, but there are other definitions of achievement in our society too, whether it’s about making more money, getting more followers, having the freedom to go on vacation with your family whenever you want, or having the ability to work in sweatpants from home. Whatever it is that feels like the goal for you, the key is that you derive meaning and satisfaction from it. You can only be living the good life if you achieve those goals. You track your progress with whether or not you’re getting closer to your goal.
This is why some of the most popular authors and speakers on the planet today are all about helping us become more productive. “Hustle more.” “Be more efficient.” “Hit inbox zero.” It’s the boom in the gig economy, freelancing, and side hustling. Lifehacks. Biohacks. Brain hacks. Hack anything to get just an ounce more productivity.
Now, is being productive inherently bad? No. I consider myself someone who likes to be productive and appreciates efficiency. What’s the problem then? The problem is when we see productivity or achievement as ends to themselves, therefore valuing our worth (and everyone else’s worth) based off of productivity.
An achievement society separates the world into winners and losers—those who can produce and those who can’t. And in Severance, Kier is worthy of devotion because of what he has achieved. His ingenuity, skill, and wisdom have placed him into godlike status. Conversely, in an achievement society, there’s no room for those who aren’t “productive.” Our society doesn’t know what to do with them, especially the very young, the old, and the disabled. Unproductive people get labeled by some as a “drain” on society. Society seems to be asking, “Is a life where you can’t achieve your goals even worth living?” We don’t know how to value a life apart from what it achieves.
Do you know what we call a thing that is judged based on its functionality, productivity, and efficiency? A machine.
More Than Machines
Most of those who are “severed” seem to have chosen such a fate because they are running from past trauma, such as the death of Mark’s wife. Instead of drowning themselves in substances like alcohol (although Outie Mark does plenty of that) they find the solution in their job. Their job is their escape from being human,1 their respite from the burdens of life.
Machines are things to be optimized and exploited for production.2 And this is how we often treat ourselves, all for the cause of achievement. Americans are the least likely to use vacation time and many workers say they often plan to work during vacation. It’s as if we think we don’t need rest. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. The only problem is, you’ll be…you know…dead.
We don’t know how to be human, we don’t know where else to find our purpose and worth, so we try to find the solution in what we do/accomplish. That’s why there’s that ever-present question when you meet someone, “What do you do?” It’s a question to discover who you are because what you do is who you are. And this is why our achievement society is a burnout society. Inevitably, this can’t hold up. We were never meant to find meaning in our achievements; it’s never going to deliver exactly what we’re looking for. In Severance, eventually, the drama from the Outies’ lives starts to bleed into the Innies’ lives, and vice versa. Some chaos ensues. You can’t hide from your humanity forever.
What Is the Purpose of Work?
So, is the solution just to not work then? To be like Herman Melville’s Bartleby and say, “I would prefer not to” when our boss gives us an assignment? No, I don’t believe so, although that would be hilarious if you tried that. Perhaps, if we lived in a purely material world and this [gestures everywhere] was all there was, that would be the right path. Eat, drink, and be lazy for tomorrow we die.
But if there is a bigger story out there, a story that we’re a part of that’s beyond ourselves, then our work and our lives can find their meaning beyond what we can achieve. Our meaning can be found in something more solid and unchanging.
Our meaning in life is found, not within ourselves or by what we can produce, but outside of ourselves, in the fact that we are made in the image of our Creator. That status is conferred upon every single human being, no matter their economic status, their ethnicity, their flaws, their beliefs, their age, their political party, their abilities, or their achievements. It’s a status that cannot be lost because it was never earned in the first place.
How does that affect our work though? The answer probably deserves its own essay…or five. But I’ll briefly say that work, whether paid or not, is a place to glorify God, serve others, and bring beauty into this world. It’s about taking our eyes off of ourselves, no longer living for the achievement society, consumed with productivity. When we practice that, we’ll find that we’re acting less like a machine and more human.
A Small Thought
On Driving the Speed Limit
You’ll all probably hate me for this. There’s a game I like to play with myself called, just driving the speed limit. Don’t blame me; I got the idea from John Mark Comer’s excellent book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
The first thing I like about it is that it saves gas, which is not a small thing in our uncertain economy. But more importantly, it pushes against the spirit of needing to get everywhere fast, of rushing. It’s “cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait.”
When you do this, what you’re going to see is a bunch of cars just whizzing past you, desperately trying to get past this insane person who’s going the speed limit and you’re going to feel that tug to speed up also. “They must all hate me. Maybe I should just speed up.” I like putting myself in situations like this where there are low stakes but I can practice pushing up against the pressures of everyone else around me. Embrace that uncomfortable feeling of being the only one doing something. It means you’re not just going with the flow and not just following the crowd.
But it’s about more than just being a contrarian. We speed so much through life. Sometimes it’s good to resist that impulse and slow down. To think, to observe, to enjoy life. “And if we can slow down both—the pace at which we think and the pace at which we move our bodies through the world—maybe we can slow down our souls to a pace at which they can ‘taste and see that the LORD is good.’ And that life in his world is good too.”
Another thing I’ve noticed when I choose to drive the speed limit is that I am a less irritable driver. I stop seeing other cars (and pedestrians) as impediments or obstacles to my day and instead am reminded that cars have people in them (and that pedestrians are people!). We’re all just trying to get to where we’re going. No need to freak out. Who cares if I don’t get there 30 seconds faster?
If you want to get really wild, try this while also driving with no music or podcasts playing.
A Thing of Beauty
GIR mini spatula
Yes, a spatula. But it’s not just any spatula. GIR (which stands for Get It Right) makes their spatula completely out of silicone, except for the fiberglass core—none of this wooden handle with a removable silicone top nonsense. It feels great in your hand and is so satisfying to use. The mini is the perfect size to help you scrape every last bit of peanut butter out of the jar, which is very satisfying. It also looks great and comes in a ton of fun colors.
What I’m Listening to
Sport’s Strangest Crimes: Spygate podcast
I usually listen to podcasts where people are having conversations, but this true crime podcast caught my eye because it was about Formula 1. I’m a recent convert to the sport and so I’ve been trying to make up for lost time by learning everything I can. But the true crime aspects of this podcast will make it appealing even to those who have no interest in F1. I don’t want to spoil everything, but as the title suggests, it’s about a huge scandal that occurred in 2007 over an incident where one team spied on another. Millions of dollars are on the line, along with a world championship. As a bonus, if you want to learn more about Taylor Swift’s potential new beau, Fernando Alonso, he plays a big role in this story.
Links
“How to Make Friends,” Clare Coffey - The New Atlantis
How our modern world is set up makes it difficult to make friends. And with loneliness and mental health issues skyrocketing in our country, that’s no small thing. When we lose friendships, even the ones that are more casual, we lose our connection to the community around us. This is all thanks to two technologies: the car and the smartphone.
“Any town or city built around the automobile will, to varying degrees, be harder to develop friendships of serendipity in. If you have to get in a car to go somewhere, and if a critical mass of people do not more or less work where they live, the overall volume and complexity of crisscrossing networks of movement will shrink. The default will be to see only the people you mean to see on purpose.”
What’s the solution? Big changes in our habits. “The game is rigged against you, and it will take major shifts in American life to unrig it.”
“What to Do When What’s Best Is Impossible,” Emily Oster - ParentData
Often as parents, we want to make sure we’re making the best choice for our kids, every single time. If we don’t make the best choice, it can feel like we’ve completely failed and should be cast out into the outer darkness.
The “first best or outer darkness” messaging isn’t just unhelpful; it’s also a way to ratchet up parent shame. No one likes to be parenting in the outer darkness. This messaging is an easy way for parents to feel like failures. Better to give people a sense that they are making a good choice, even if it is not the first-best one.
Have a little bit of grace for yourself.
“The Surprising Thing A.I. Engineers Will Tell You If You Let Them,” Ezra Klein - New York Times
Every day brings new headlines about AI engineers sounding the alarm for governments to step in quickly and regulate the AI boom. Will we listen? “What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.”
Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast. Airplanes rarely crash because the Federal Aviation Administration is excellent at its job.
The article ends with a non-exhaustive list of questions that AI regulations must keep in mind. One of the main concerns is humanness.
Do we want a world filled with A.I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings? Because make no mistake: That is a design decision, not an emergent property of machine-learning code. A.I. systems can be tuned to return dull and caveat-filled answers, or they can be built to show off sparkling personalities and become enmeshed in the emotional lives of human beings.
“Social Media Scatters Your Brain, and Then You Buy Stuff You Don’t Need,” Matthew Pittman - The Conversation
My buddy, Matthew, a professor at the University of Tennessee ran a study that found that you are more susceptible to ads after scrolling on social media because of “cognitive overload.”
In one study we asked people to explain why they wanted to buy a product, and those in the control group gave simple, rational answers for their choice: “I was thinking of the ice cream flavors and how they would taste.” Or, “I like the ad. It is simple and clean. It gets straight to the point …” However, those who had just scrolled social media for 30 seconds often gave answers that made no sense. For example, some gave one-word answers like “food” or “plate.” Others explicitly told us it was difficult to process: “It had too many words and options in the picture.”
That explains a lot of my recent purchases.
“Media-rich environments like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube are presumably the most mentally taxing because they have text, photos, videos, animations and sound – often all at once and overlapping. These platforms are also where advertisers spend a lot of money, as they offer a high return on investment for brands.”
Thoughts on the Mandalorian
Instead of a whole article, I just wrote out some bullet points. They’re not fully fleshed-out thoughts. Just initial reactions.
I liked the season for the most part. It wasn’t as strong as season 2, which is probably going to be impossible to beat, but I had fun, which is all I ask of a franchise like Star Wars.
The season had its flaws though. At times it kind of felt like the creators, Favreau and Filoni, were focused on something else, probably the upcoming Ahsoka show.
Star Wars traditionally stays away from stunt casting (big cameos to get the internet to freak out), so the Lizzo, Jack Black, and Christopher Lloyd episode was kinda jarring for that reason. The problem with stunt casting is that it can take you out of the universe and breaks the spell of the story. Instead of feeling like you’re getting this inside look into another universe (or galaxy far far away), you’re watching Nacho Libre cosplay as a space mayor. I did like the detective aspect of the episode, though. It would be fun to see a CSI series in the Star Wars universe.
I would have liked the show to linger more on Mandalore. We don’t spend a lot of quiet moments on the planet. It’s mostly pew pew, smash smash, bang bang. The few quiet moments we got, like with the Mandalorian survivors who had remained on the planet, left me wanting more. They could have even done a whole episode just recounting how the survivors were able to make it all these years.
On that note, I loved the imagery of the survivors planting a garden. It shows the world is healing when you’re able to cultivate the land and bring forth life out of it. It also reminded me of the prophet Jeremiah’s letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon where he encourages them to “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce” (Jeremiah 29:5). In the Bible, garden imagery is often used to symbolize peace and prosperity, especially after wartime. “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken” (Micah 4:3-4).
The reconciliation of the two factions felt way too fast. The history of the Mandalorian people has been plagued for many many years by strife and civil war. They fought each other so much that they ruined their planet and had to live in domed cities. What can heal such massive wounds that have centuries of history? Apparently, all you need is just a cookout.
Ending on a positive note. I love the idea that being baptized into the community is described as adding your name to Mandalore’s song. It’s really beautiful. As a Mandalorian, you’re not just a lone ranger (which is typically what we think of when we think of Mandalorians), you’re connected to this body of people and connected to the hundreds of generations who came before you. Together, you’re all singing the same song.
We find out that a minor character (who doesn’t work at Lumon) gets severed so she doesn’t have to consciously go through the pain of childbirth, literally escaping one of the most human things in life, birthing another human life.
In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has a whole bunch of characters who participate in the mechanization of nature. Do you know who they are? The bad guys!
Anything in life that becomes more important or a higher priority than GOD is....an idol....including work....after-all, the first commandment is, “thou shalt not have any other gods before Me.”
Driving the speed limit is convicting me 😭