Is Your 9-5 Slowly Killing You? Severance Reveals Why Men and Women Experience Corporate Hell Differently

Severance is one of the best shows on television right now, solidifying Apple TV as a leading producer of prestige television, rivaling the quality of even HBO. The show is about a dystopian workplace run by Lumon Industries—a monopolistic megacorporation trailblazing a controversial medical procedure that severs the consciousness of its employees into two distinctly separate identities. 

The "innies," whose consciousness is activated via brain chip upon entry to the company's elevator, only exist in the context of work, while the "outies" never experience work at all. As a result of this separation of consciousness, each severed employee working on the severed floor of Lumon Industries has given birth, so to speak, to a new person within the host's body, complete with separate memories, identities, and experiences. Since the brain chip is only activated in the elevator of Lumon Industries, the innies can only exist at work, condemning them to a Sisyphean life of meaningless labor that never ends. 

Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan work in Macrodata Refinement (MDR), sorting through sets of numbers. They're instructed to identify, isolate, and dispense of "scary" numbers (this task is depicted as esoteric and based on intuitive feeling). The work is, as Mark so eloquently describes it, "mysterious and important." In other words, they have no idea what they're doing, why they're doing it, or what the end result is, just that it must be done. Sound familiar? 

Lumon dangles insultingly underwhelming juvenile rewards to incentivize productivity, referred to as "perks." Refine enough macro data, and you could earn yourself a pristine collection of erasers and fingertips, a five-minute music dance experience, a waffle party, or an egg bar social. The company isn't just metaphysically imprisoning the innies at Lumon Industries; they're also indoctrinating them. Lumon's founder, Kier Egan, is mythologized as a religious figure whose teachings have biblical undertones.  

The perpetuity wing of the building contains a museum-like shrine honoring the founder, Kier Egan's life, and an exaggerated, propagandized history. Both the employees and workers drink the Kool-Aid in a quasi-religious manner. The innies may have their own consciousness, but their outies don't recognize their humanity, condemning them to an inhuman existence complete with psychological torture, perpetual labor, control, and repression, unable to make contact with the outside world or outside humans. 

A day of polite meetings and digital busywork doesn't scratch the same existential itch of duty, sacrifice, and conquest.

Some of the innies are driven to suicide attempts, but their innies control their destiny, continually bringing them back to work and denying their agency or personhood. Helena Eagan tells her innie, "I am a person; you are not. I make the decisions; you do not." Severance grapples with so many interesting ideas about identity and consciousness, but it's also a perfect metaphor for the modern workplace. The office as a workplace dystopia isn't a new trope. 1999's Office Space sees a similarly feminized bureaucratic office life that its protagonist, Peter, finds soul-crushing. Ultimately, he re-establishes his agency by turning to construction—a job that involves physicality, purpose, and seeing the tangible end-result of your labor. 

Much like Megha's tweet, films of the 90s like Office Space, Fight Club, and American Beauty, as illustrated by The Take, "all presented men disillusioned with meaningless jobs radically breaking out of their corporate prisons; leaving behind the rat race for a more visceral, physical, and real experience of life." But the "soul-crushing" nature of domesticated office life at least still had its advantages—solid benefits, upward mobility, rewarded company loyalty, a good salary, and a booming housing market. 

Work really ended when you clocked out in the pre-digital age, but now that we're permanently connected via smartphones and company chat services like Slack, work/life imbalance is worse than ever. Employers expect you to be accessible around the clock, and this is dramatized in the way the innies literally can't escape the workplace. Believe me, they've tried. Since they're temporospatially damned to the Severed floor of Lumon Industries, there is only one exit: the elevator, which activates the brain chip and switches between their consciousnesses.

The innies embody the modern disillusionment with corporate work: the cult-like indoctrination of their empty mission statements and insistence that we're all a "family" or the unquestioning loyalty to corporate overlords who run shady businesses. The office "perks" are insultingly infantilizing in the same way that loyal employees who've worked for a company for 50 years are rewarded with underwhelming pizza parties. 

The most salient element of Severance, however, is how the innies, who are like doomed-to-corporate babies, have no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it; only that it needs to be done. This is reminiscent of the "fake jobs" discourse that sees people making fun of "project managers" and "consultants" whose job titles are so vague and imprecise that even the people who hold them can't tell you what it is they really do. 

Severance doesn't single out men as uniquely affected by this corporate malaise. If anything, the men in this show are more receptive to Lumon's empty philosophy and their pacifying distractions than Helly is. She's so distressed and desperate for autonomy that she attempts to take her own life several times. 

But in the real world, men do seem uniquely discontented with office life. As Alex Kaschuta observes, “there is something to be said about the [idea] that purposelessness affects the sexes differently. I feel like women—there's some small day-to-day ambition that women can get into that kind of confers... there's a social circle, there's activities, the coffee, even the gossip—the things that, like little puzzle pieces, build up the meaning of the day without having to have this big conquest on the horizon and this big motivating thing." Men, by contrast, don't seem as motivated by these micro-fulfillments. The innies dramatize this crisis of purposelessness: infantilized, neutered, denied meaningful agency, yet expected to smile through it. 

RFH describes it as an inversion of the suburban malaise that afflicted housewives in the 1950s to early 1960s—a sense of purposelessness and despair that Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique. She called it "the problem that has no name." She argued the central problem was that women were being denied full personhood, much like the innies in Severance are denied full personhood by their outies. 

Friedman described the housewife malaise as existential. "Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?" 

It wasn't that women needed a fake job to feel fulfilled; it was that housewives were running entire microcivilizations while being told they weren't really doing anything at all. The work was unpaid, taken for granted, and culturally erased. There was no clocking out, milestones, or recognition, just a lifelong expectation to serve without being valued or acknowledged. They weren't just bored but felt a denial of their autonomy. They couldn't have an identity outside of being a wife and mother. 

They didn't lack comfort; they lacked a sense of self. Modern housewives have the fortune of choosing the life they want as an exercise of their agency, the knowledge they have the freedom to choose, and full participation in public life. Women have access to education, careers, intellectual stimulation, and the freedom to cultivate ambition, should they want to. Considering women construct their entire lives and source of meaning through social belonging and validation, it makes sense that this erasure of personhood felt deeply illegitimizing.

Fast forward to the present, and men are choking on the inverse. Office work is loaded with symbolic structure: job titles, performance reviews, “perks,” but it's detached from consequence and meaning. It feels like fake work moving around imaginary numbers (in the case of Severance, this is literally the case). 

Men aren't satisfied with mere social belonging and tasks that fill up the day. They're hierarchical and mission-oriented (hunters, not gatherers). Their ambition is driven by impact and visible stakes. While women can find contentment in a rich interpersonal ecosystem, even if it seems a bit mundane from the outside, men feel useless without a clear mission or conquest. There really is something to the joke, "Men used to go to war." 

A day of polite meetings and digital busywork doesn't scratch the same existential itch of duty, sacrifice, and conquest. It’s not that men are ill-suited for office work in a capability sense, but that their normative temperament causes them to feel like they’re slowly dying in office cubicles. You can feel them trying to communicate this passive aggressively through sterile "get ready with me for my 9 to 5" TikToks and YouTube vlogs. They're polished but empty. They feel robotic, inhuman, and lacking adventure. It feels like a cry for help, begging someone to recognize, "This is no way to live."