When I heard the basic pitch of the show, that workers sever half their brain to work and half to their personal lives such that they don’t remember their work life at all, I first figured that the idea was that this would be done to have workers execute horrifying tasks. But the show correctly sidesteps this early on: the big reveal is not that the main characters find out they’re committing war crimes or killing babies “down there”—this is not Sorry to Bother You. Smartly, the big reveal is that they’re just doing…nothing. They’re doing make-work, things that appear like work. The severed workers tidy the break room, hang relaxing artwork on the hallway walls, and are compelled to perform mind-numbing repetitive tasks (that are incomprehensible to anyone but them) in their little computer programs that sometimes make them feel bad.
They’re just doing something, and you quickly get the sense that what they are doing is not as important as how they are able to do it. The entire operation is seemingly, at best, a torturous psychological experiment put on by Lumon, testing how best to manage the tortured psyches their severance chips create, so that they can feel confident rolling out the technology world-wide. And these people are tortured. They’re essentially like babies. They are the ideal worker: they have the basic knowledge and skills to retain function in work but they have no other life to speak of that could distract them from work. Lumon has complete control over these workers. And yet, the workers’ lives are devoid of meaning, and we see them hunger for it—for anything at all of substance.
The experiment thus comes from the drip feeding. They are given these sad imitations of life, just enough to give them something, anything, to latch on to. A tiny amount of socializing is allowed, and father Milchick gives them facsimiles of entertainment and socialization (e.g., “dance” “parties”) if they’re good. They are given a religion to derive meaning from (worship Eagan, and follow his philosophy to worship your work), including a bible to study and quote from (the workplace manual). And they are given small rewards as performance incentives (toys, a picture, and as we see in the last episode, even the hint of any sort of eroticism in an unsettling ultimate prize). They are essentially answering the following question: can we create a human being that is happy and healthy enough to work productively with nothing more than the tantalizing idea of a waffle party contingent on hitting one’s quarterly metrics?
The show seems to think not. Eventually, trouble brews. Of course it does: why do you think they’re doing this whole process in the first place, instead of just shipping out the chips to everyone right away? The workers are tortured, they’ll go insane. Central to the show, however, is the understanding that they aren’t being tortured simply because Lumon is a uniquely malevolent force in the world that just enjoys performing cruel acts on their workers. They are being tortured because work is torture. Work is not life. Which is why it’s ultimately not enough to sustain the “innie” worker, whose entire life is made to be work.
This conflict, between work and life, between the ideal of a completely efficient productive worker who knows nothing but labor and the reality of that worker being unable to function due to the lack of life and meaning, is what leads to the collective action undertaken by the office workers. If Lumon could get away without the drip feeding of life and meaning, they would. But they can’t, clearly. People have to be given something to live for, have to be given some sense of agency. These small corners of autonomy are what allow for the workers to gain information, power, and come together in the end (almost like they’re…organizing!). No matter how hard they try, Lumon can’t control everything. The most basic of humanity and normalcy that they afford the workers gives them space, information, and eventually power: some small talk here and there, a supply closet that the workers have access to that they can talk privately in, even a fire alarm drill causing a break in protocol that allows Mark to find out where the security room is. Workers will find a way.
And it’s love and the most basic yearnings for life that most strongly compel the workers to question their surroundings. Irving shares the briefest of touch and a hint of emotional intimacy with a man from another department just by chance, and is from then on pulled toward it inexorably, causing even the most pious man to ignore Eagan’s teachings on office romance. Mark sacrifices his well-being to try to spare Helly, and when he sees her suicide attempt is aghast and shocked out of his “this is just the way things are” line. Dylan is hugged by his son for two seconds, and not but a few hours later has worked himself into such a rage that the top worker of the department throws everything away, attacking Milchick and demanding to see his son in the most exhilarating scene of the show. Milchick is astonished, like he would have never expected this to happen (“he broke skin!”). But for Dylan, it’s everything. Yesterday, he had finger traps; now, he has a son. Not his “outtie”—he does. And he needs to see his son. The meaning that knowledge and that briefest of hugs gives to Dylan is more than all the years of pointless work combined, and anyone who stands in the way of uniting them must surely be a monster.
So, what do we do with this? Is this what work is, sans everything else? Sans the life that we try to inject into it? The work-life balance, the socialization that work provides us, the meaning we derive for ourselves from being good at our jobs or from achieving our goals. Is all of that just masking what is fundamentally an inhuman process?
Or is there a version of work that is worthwhile? Is this just one version of work, incentivized by capitalism? The show surely is concerned with systemic issues rather than placing the blame on individuals—Cobel is a true believer in Eagan’s ideology, for her own sad reasons, but she ultimately answers to the board. The investors are the ones who allow someone like her to be in power, they’re the ones who want all of this (think of the profits!). And so long as we live some form of labor will be necessary. Things that we’d rather not do, but must. Things that we must, as a society, coerce ourselves into in one way or another. So, can we create an ethical world, an ethical form of work? Or will it always be something fundamentally inhuman, something that will fight against us? And, perhaps more urgently, how should you organize with your fellow workers?
