Contemplating Questions from Severance

The Placeholder can be the Hallway to Wholeness and Meaning.

Confession: I’ve become obsessed with Severance, the Apple+ TV series, as it throws so many great questions about work and workplaces.

Particularly, I think the show is practically a psychological allegory for both quiet quitting and the Great Resignation, two symptoms of disengagement at workplace. Without spoiling the story too much, I reflected on many allegories of the modern workplaces in Severance.

Disconnection between Work Self & Real Self

The lousiest year in my career was 2016. “Lousy” because I was not at all engaged with my work. I looked busy at work, and my performance was okay. But in reality, I was slacking off, doing the bare minimum with detachment.

My disengagement at work in 2016 would be a perfect example of “quiet quitting.” What is quiet quitting? It’s a term that first appeared in 2022. Gallup defines it as follows:

Quiet quitting: Employees are filling a seat and watching the clock. They put in the minimum effort required, and they are psychologically disconnected from their employer. Although they are minimally productive, they are more likely to be stressed and burned out than engaged workers because they feel lost and disconnected from their workplace.

This “quiet quitting” created a chasm in me. I kept the façade of my “work self” when I went to work. Most of the days at work, I was either daydreaming in endless meetings, aimlessly browsing for other potential jobs, or scrolling through Instagram. Subconsciously, the notion I didn’t find my career meaningful sneaked up on me, but I pretended I didn’t see it and kept going as was.

Working on an “interesting” job at a respected company like Meta; everything must be fine, right? No. My “real self” was utterly miserable and grew impatient with this pretense. My career had gone stale, but I feigned it until that day of the tantrum on the shuttle.

Severance literally created this separation between work self and real self with the “innie” and “outie” selves of characters. Innie exists only at work and the outie never knows what happens at the office. The writer of the show, Dan Erickson, said it was based on his own experience working in the office job for a door company when he was still an aspiring screenwriter. Although he was grateful for the job that he could support himself for writing career, he detested the mind-numbing dullness and exhaustion from his day job. He wondered “What if I could just completely forget about what happened at work when I go home?” This idea planted a seed for Severance.

While quiet quitting is about emotional detachment from work while still physically showing up, “Great Resignation” is about choosing to integrate their whole selves by walking away from work that doesn’t align with who they are.

The term was coined in May 2021 by Anthony Klots, an associate professor at Texas A&M Mays Business School at the time, to explain the mass exodus of people from work during the pandemic. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs, and in 2022, it rose to 51 million.

At the time, most scholars attributed this mass exit of the workforce mostly to COVID-19 and reasoned it was a temporary phenomenon. However, over the last four years, further research studies by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, universities, and consulting firms revealed that there were more nuanced underlying reasons for individuals to participate in the Great Resignation. Plus, it continued even after pandemic.

Harvard researchers found out more people quit their jobs these days mainly because they aren’t making the progress they seek in their careers and lives. The progress here doesn’t mean a steady, linear climb up the corporate ladder, as we used to define it in the past. It’s not the job title, how much money you make, or what kind of perks you get. Even though you might be promoted at work, if it doesn’t mean anything for your personal development, you don’t progress.

The progression that matters now is at the intersection of what each individual seeks in professional and personal life. This means the progress is unique to each individual. If the traditional progression meant quantity and security, people today are looking for quality and autonomy, which is more personal.

On the surface, Severance seems to promise a perfect solution for work-life balance—keep the work and real self separate. You won’t suffer from work stress in your life; problem solved! But it also shows it’s not that simple.

The show asks, “What if our inner self is begging us to quit because the work doesn’t align with who we are?” Compartmentalization may work only in a short-term. We can pretend we don’t hear the voice of inner self for a while but eventually we reach a point when we cannot ignore anymore, even with a perfect severed brain.

Conflicts between Work, Self, and Meaning

A CEO of a startup once told me, “My new hire is amazing; he’s so savvy with all the technology and full of new ideas.” She wanted to help this new employee maximize his potential at work, but doing so was not easy. “He always asks me to clarify why his project is worth doing. I appreciate his purpose-driven attitude, and I know that matters to Gen Z. But at the end of the day, what matters to me is whether he gets the job done as expected,” she said. She was skeptical if it was really necessary to impose meaning on everything.

It’s not just Gen Zs who want to be seen as a whole person and work on something meaningful. It’s an innate need for everyone. In Severance, we can see what happens to our identities when we identify ourselves with work, and when our work is the only world we know.

With severed brain, innies don’t have any ideas about the life of their outies. Their entire world is just their workplace. They long for any opportunities to learn about their outies’ lives and Lumon manipulates innies to behave and do better with their jobs by offering such opportunities as “perks.” So every day, innies work on their mind-numbing jobs without knowing what they are doing or what their jobs mean, until they couldn’t do it anymore. Eventually, they cannot endure the damage on their souls from the meaningless and monotonous work.

People become quiet quitters when they are just seen as their jobs or roles. Also, quiet quitting emerges when people lose meaning in their work. The Great Resignation is an expression of people to reclaim their identities by leaving misaligned jobs, too. People who participate in the Great Resignation, in part, are saying “I can’t do meaningless work anymore.”

The show asks, “What’s left of you when work consumes your identity?” In a way, the Great Resignation was a collective answer to this question: ‘Not enough.’ And when the work has no meaning, no wonder we “sever” our souls, a.k.a., quiet quitting, just to get through the day.

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Three Questions to Contemplate from Severance

Severance asks us three important questions to contemplate.

• What if quiet quitting is just our inner self whispering, “this isn’t it” — and the Great Resignation was when we finally listened?

• How far are we willing to go to protect ourselves from work — and at what cost?

• What would it look like to reunite the “innie” and “outie” — to be our whole self at work?

Interestingly, people I interviewed for The Placeholder also raised similar questions for themselves as they embarked on the Placeholder journey. They couldn’t ignore the desperate whisper of their inner selves and had to stretch out themselves to experiment new ideas. This was an act of protecting themselves from meaningless work. As they create their own Noble Work through the Placeholder experiments, they became congruent, whole.

The real villain of Severance isn’t the technology or evil management. It’s the lack of empathy for humans. Lumon treats innies like robots, showing zero empathy for them. People often label quiet quitting as being lazy, but it could actually be just self-preservation from further emotional, mental, and physical damages. The Great Resignation could simply be people demanding to be treated like humans, not like a cog in the machine.

My Placeholder experience started by empathizing with myself, by admitting the fact that the career I once thought meaningful was no longer valuable to me anymore. Through constant ideation and experiments, I could finally honor my own longing for the new meaningful work. I was no longer disengaged or languishing; instead, I created my own path to thrive through the Placeholder.

Lumon isn’t real but the world is full of its manifestation. For me and many people I interviewed, we got out of the Lumon-like situations with our innies. Then we entered the Placeholder, the place where we no longer feel the chasm inside.

This is possible for you, too.

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About The Placeholder

The Placeholder📕 is going to be published and available in May, 2025.

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