Working limitations - often invisible yet underplayed - are the forces that mold our every movement and will. From looming deadlines, work stress, endless meetings, and the human need for conformity, the boundaries between work and personal life know no separation, infiltrating every aspect of living.

What if we simply forgot? 

What if there was a way to void ourselves from the stress and complexities that are so often beyond our control?

Severance, the AppleTV+ production, directed by Ben Stiller, and written and created by Dan Erikson, explores the ideas of a severed mind. The show follows ‘severed workers,’ as those who obtained a procedure to isolate the lives of their work self (‘innie’) and their personal self (‘outie’). The breach and discontent between those two personalities, the same yet somehow completely different, quickly erupts, and the show begins. 

The idea, obviously unethical, was more than just displacing ourselves from work, it was a way to forget. Mark Scout, played by actor Adam Scott, revolutionizes his role as the head of his department. The audience quickly learns Mark uses his work as an ‘innie’ to evade the grief that plagues him after losing his wife a few years prior. His ‘outie’ remembers and his ‘innie’ forgets.

For eight hours a day, Mark can forget.

So what is it? What are the characters truly escaping? Who is truly trapped?

The obvious answer is that one's ‘innie’ is miserable and entrapped, merely imprisoned, withheld, and coerced under extreme limitations placed upon them. But Mark shows quite the opposite.

His whole ‘severed’ team shows the opposite. Helly Riggs, whose ‘outie’ is poisoned with guilt and emptiness, gains love as her ‘innie.’ Irving Bailiff, the ‘wise one’ of the team, leads an outside life riddled with obsession and alienation. Lastly, Dylan George goes home under financial pressures and an otherwise gloomy marriage.

The misery of each character masterfully symbolized in power hierarchies paralleling their inside and outside lives, strips them of enjoyment in any area of their lives. Dylan’s contained lifestyle, Irving’s obsession, Helly’s insecurity, and Mark’s dooming grief, echo the same oppressive forces waiting for them at work. The breaches between being merely imprisoned, without consent, and being forced to live in society's worst limitations, is the story that Severance tells.

It leaves oneself wondering: Where am I allowed to be whole?