To Be or Not to Be Human at Work

In yesterday’s article entitled “The (Semi)Dystopian Answer to the Work/Life Balance Question” I spoke about the far-too-chilling Severance series currently featured on AppleTV.

In this video, I go deeper into dissecting why the series is so telling -and implicitly terrifying- for most of us. One of the story's twists is that the double entendre behind the concept of "break room" that I mention in this video hasn't occurred to me but to my super perceptive and hyper-empathic 11-year-old Dara who pointed it out the other night!

The very fact that we all recognise the premise of this is shocking. That we relate. That we intrinsically fear it.

Think about the monstrosity of the fact that no one reading the premise goes “Wait, so why would they want to remove their personal-life self? Don’t people need that at work to be a whole human?”. No one. They don’t, because it makes sense. The “Work needs robots, not humans” corollary. Sadly. Deplorably.

We have come to expect that. We all feel it. That our humanity was never welcomed at work. Cast your mind back to most places that fancy themselves “serious” and “professional” where at least before the pandemic forced us into this much more human place, even smiling or cracking jokes could easily harm someone’s reputation in the company. Or where people had worked together for years without knowing anything about each others personal lives and while never mentioning it.