We all want the sweet sweet work-life balance in our life. It’s a simple concept that we want to manage our work and our life in a way that it is balanced and we can enjoy them both. It is though to get there. I saw a TV Show called Severance last week. I also reviewed it on my other website, you can check that out here.

So, spoiler warning for the show because I will be discussing the concept on which the show is based. I am not going in too deep into the spoilers but still a warning is needed.

The Concept

The concept of the show is that when you do to work then you will forget your personal life. And when you come out of work then you will forget your work life. More like the brain is severed in two parts, one is work memories and one is personal / outside work. Now this is interesting because then when you are with family, you truly are with family and when you are working at the office, you truly are working. This is procedure provided by a company in the show, and it is called the severance program. Now the problem with this is, you can only quit your job when the person outside the office (outie) wants to, so if the person inside the office (innie) does not like it, he feels overwhelmed and want’s to just get out then he cannot. The outie and innie cannot talk or communicate to each other, that is prohibited and the outie will never know what he is working on which can lead to his innie working on sketchy things without him even knowing. Half of yourself will be in anguish of just leaving that place and the other half won’t ever know it.

Toxic Relationship with Work

People have talked about having toxic relationship with work and look at such a solution and might feel like it’s a solution. But in reality it is not. It is a complicated to thing to explain but I’ll try my best to explain it,

Work-life balance should be a balance, it should not be work-life separation.

I always go on saying this every time which is, there is not right or wrong side in most cases. No solution is perfect, you need to choose multiple solutions for multiple situations. There is no black and white either, there is always a gradient. and too much of one thing is always going to be bad. Productivity is good but too much of it will lead you to be isolated and feeling miserable. Same thing applies here i.e., if you separate yourself into work and non work self, literally and metaphorically, you will not be you.

The best example I can give is from the Star Trek: The Original Series, when Captain Kirk was separated into two people because of transporter malfunction. There one good Captain Kirk and one bad. It is easy to think that killing the bad one and getting all good Captain Kirk is the solution, but we need both our good and the bad side to balance ourselves. It is essential for decision making, making those hard choices in life requires your bad side to intervene and say that you should be selfless all the time. Anyways, I just found the concept interesting so I thought I would write about it.

Thank you for reading till the end. If you want to say something or add something or say I might be wrong about this then do comment below. And yes if you are interested and read my review of the show by clicking this link.