I’Ve Watched Two seasons of this show called ‘Severance’.
The premise is that select employees of Lumon Industries have a chip implanted into their brains so that their memories can be effectively switched on and off.
When they enter their floor at work, they are unable to retain any recollections from their personal lives and when they leave the building, they cannot remember what they did all day in the office.
It is branded as a procedure necessary to protect the sensitive information they work with, and most people when they hear of the premise for the first time, think it would be a great way to achieve a form of work-life balance.
I mean, think about it: You get up in the morning, get to the office at 09h00, you blink, and suddenly it’s 17h00.
That sounds like a dream, right? It seems like you can get a paycheck and never ever have to worry about work.
Whatever you do for those eight hours remains a mystery to you and you can spend your time focusing on anything else, pursuing hobbies and making friends.
But can you imagine what life would be like for the version of you that has no memories of your real life? From that perspective, work is never-ending.
When you leave at the end of the day, it feels as though it is immediately 09h00 again.
You don’t even get the comfort of knowing who you are outside work. For your entire existence, you live inside the walls of your employer, leaving you effectively trapped.
This show has raised many ethical and existential issues, some we have never really had to think about before, and many that stay the same, no matter what time or technological period we are in.
Let’s look at something particularly familiar: The way we treat ourselves.
In one of the earlier episodes of the two-season show, a new recruit wakes up in the office with no memory of how she got there.
She is told her outside self signed her up for a new job and it is her first day of work.
Naturally, she is not too excited to have no memories and a job she did not ask for.
She asks, demands and begs, multiple times, to be allowed to leave, but she soon discovers that the arrangement is not voluntary for those on the inside.
Your outside version makes all the choices.
This doesn’t sound so bad when you know you would obviously care about yourself and want the best for yourself, right? Wrong.
This poor new employee makes a request to someone who is essentially herself to be allowed to resign.
This request is denied, and that signifies a strong theme of the show moving forward.
Both versions of the same person want opposing things, and neither is willing to compromise for the other.
Both people feel like they have the right to make choices for themselves, yet only one of them has any actual power over the other.
I’ve seen many people who watch this show ponder how someone could treat themselves so harshly. Yes, you might essentially have two different consciousnesses, but technically you are still one, right?
Well, I think the same issue translates to real life pretty neatly.
There are many past versions of us, and many future versions are yet to come into existence.
The present version of us is also ever changing and leaping forward one second at a time.
We have many opportunities to do nice things for our future versions, but choose not to, and we are held hostage by the decisions of our past self.
You could choose to eat healthy, exercise, go to sleep early, not procrastinate, rinse the dishes, separate the laundry, et cetera, so life is a little easier later on, but we constantly elect not to.
We smoke and drink alcohol and consume substances that are bad for us, because we don’t feel the negative effects in the moment.
The tomorrow version of you can deal with the hangover, the liver failure, the lung cancer, and the extra weight, right? The future you can fold the laundry, sort out the clutter, get work done and complete your to-do list while you relax, right?
We are in a situation where we get to be the victims and perpetrators of our actions at the same time, just like in ‘Severance’.
The truth is we are selfish beings.
Despite our high capacity for empathy, we just struggle to see the world from anyone else’s perspective but our own.
It’s difficult for us to even fathom or care about the feelings of our future selves. It’s why we do things we regret, and why we can act so callously with our own time.
This is why I really enjoy good television. There’s nothing quite like being filled with existential dread during the time you should be doing a leisurely activity.
Even if I don’t have a solution, it’s interesting to think and write about it.
Next time you want to leave all the difficult stuff for your future self, consider how that self may feel, and consider being a little nicer to that self.
– Anne Hambuda is a poet, writer, social commentator and novelist. Follow her online or email her at annehambuda@gmail.com for more.
