I’ve found a place that has done the impossible: perfected work-life balance. And you can have
it too! ...by surgically dividing your memories. Apple TV’s Severance introduces Lumon
Industries, a company that offers a procedure that divides employees’ memories in
two—essentially creating two versions of the same person: one that only exists at work and
another that exists outside of work, knowing nothing of their office life. No stress from work
creeping into your personal life. No personal baggage distracting you from the scary numbers
on your spreadsheets. A perfect divide. But if your life is split in two, are you still whole?
 

Personal identity is something I’ve obsessed over for years. Maybe too much. Blame it on
watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at a crucial phase of my adolescence, or just
never quite feeling like I fit into one, singular, definitive version of myself. But Severance brought
that little existential kick back into my life! So I ask you to indulge me in this: if your memory is
erased, is your identity erased too?
 

This question made me think of John Locke, the 17th-century philosopher who argued that
personal identity isn’t rooted in the body or some unchanging soul, but rather in memory and
consciousness. For instance, you know you were once twelve because you remember what it
felt like to be that age—the way your childhood bedroom looked, the friends you had, the
posters on your wall. That thread of memory connects past you to present you, forming a
continuous identity, making you the same person over time.
 

But what if that thread is cut?
 

In Severance, Lumon’s workers, or “severed” employees, are split into two identities: a work self
(innie) and a home self (outie), neither of whom remembers the other. By Locke’s logic, they’re
not the same person—just two separate beings trapped in the same body, clocking in and out of
existence every day.
 

But this raises a bigger question: how much of yourself can change before you’re no longer
you? It’s a bit like Theseus’s Ship, an old philosophical paradox. If you replace one plank of a
ship, it’s still the same ship. But if, over time, you replace every part, is it still the same vessel? If
your memories, your experiences, your relationships, are stripped away piece by piece, at what
point do you become someone else entirely?
 

This barely scratches the surface. In fact, it’s not even a scratch—just a smudge. But if you
enjoy a good mind f*ck, I beg you to watch.
 

I’ll leave you with one last thought before you go: Who are you today? And is that who you’d like
to be tomorrow?