What happens when workers are completely alienated from work? This is an issue raised by Severance, a well-known procedure at the heart of Apple TV+ Hit. There, employees of the fictional company Lumon, divorced from a non-workplace, struggle with pointless work in underground level prisons. If the central metaphor for Season 1 was that even a branched brain could not truly separate from his own work, then Season 2 became inevitable for that knowledge. I'm working on what will happen in the future. We need to deal with and overcome alienation from the self.
The retirement process is raised as an employee's solution. By not remembering your work day, you achieve work-life balance. Literally, I quit my job at the door (or elevator, or in some cases elevator). But like all the technological advances flowing downwards from businesses, this innovation doesn't help workers as much as bosses. Because the history and context of the outside world are not used, disconnected employees in the Macrodata Sophistication department are easy to manipulate and abuse, and they don't understand how meaningless their work is. This work is really important and may be mystical, but they just sort the scary numbers and don't know at all the points of their labor. This complaint follows them, worsening and not diminishing due to retirement.
As Season 2 expands and spends more time with Aupia, there will be a richer picture of how the disconnect, which should be a leisurely experience, will affect them. Dylan (Zach Cherry) in particular is a calm case study. Despite his beloved wife and three lovely children, he is chronically unhappy with many of him. For Irving B (John Tartulo), his out's activities remain the most opaque, but he most of his time portraying the same ominous scenes in the export hall, making what he thinks he left in the office. It looks like he's trying to get it back. Meanwhile, Helly R. (Britt Lower) appears to be living a more fulfilling life than her Outie. Helena Egan temporarily took her life and stole the joy of her relationship with Helly R and Mark S (Adam Scott). She may be Egan, the heirs of the company are obvious, but the obscenely wealthy corporate class still suffers from the effects of alienation – estrangement from their human nature.
Mark did the job that was cut off during his work day to try and forget about his dead wife Gemma, but it didn't seem to have been translated into something good for him. He drinks alone, has a bad day, and occasionally drags him to dinner parties where his well-meaned sister hates him.
But Gemma, the reason why Mark retired, is also why he is trying to invalidate himself. Outie Mark, who had previously refused to be involved in his Inie light-form, is now undergoing “reintegration.” This reminds Mark S. and Mark Meld of their experiences with Lumon and are trapped as Wellness counselor Ms. Casey. Dichen Lachman). Reintegration is a specific photor. Your work self has finally passed through to the rest of you that you can't actually bear. And the worse the conditions, the greater the liberation that overcomes them.
Reintegration/You are you
The “rebellion” “bred from a sight of irrationality in the face of an unjust and incomprehensible state,” writes Albert Camus. Mark S has a kind of moxie lacking in his out, born out of his particularly unjust and incomprehensible state. But Outie Mark's slow penetration into reintegration gives him some of his Innie's courage. Engaging in his work life makes Outie Mark even more lively.
On the through line, which began with the pilot's foodless dinner scene, Mark always suddenly gets hungry. His fridge is mostly empty, except for a bottle of beer and a small bottle of what appears to be a chicken soup big name product. Mark seems to have internalized this – as he falls into the pain of reunification, chicken soup soylent creates a charm and trip to a local Chinese restaurant, where he scarfs the plate after a plate of real food Masu. His whole process is exhausting and requires nourishment, but this hunger – this joy in food – represents something greater.
The marks are no longer optimized. They are not willing to understand themselves as a product of efficiency. The power of late capitalism means that we all self-optimize into an infinitely h-hustle culture of non-stop work, but food is so that we treat ourselves like we are physically One of the human pleasures that forces you to eat, and it can occur that you have to spend time in a space where there is an opportunity to eat – in the case of Mark, questionable break-in with Hellenaigan, but faster but more It pushes you to a tough version of reintegration.
Mark gives him hunger, showing that he has no will to distort himself, and that he has no will to sacrifice his life's things into a productive scheme.
The opposite of alienation / We are us
Mark's lesser-than-way wife Gemma engaged in this kind of nourishing activity. When he misses her especially badly, Mark hides in the basement and opens a box of refills. You can see clumsy candles in the red and green of Christmas. Activities that fall outside of the productivity culture “give her time to think,” explains Mark.
This is the opposite of alienation. Karl Marx called it Life – or Species –But today, his unstable German translations are mostly distilled to “essence.” Each human idea as a part of humanity is the greatest and prosperity that arises when we organize our lives and ourselves individually and collectively, other than the products of capital.
Work takes something from you, something essential and literally, something, and less you. This loss can be replenished with a pleasant pursuit. For Marx, this means eating, drinking, buying books, going to the theatre or pub, thinking, affection, theorizing, singing, painting, and more. Your capital. In other words, the essence of life comes from joy and socialisation, but alienation from our humanity comes not only from work, but from understanding ourselves as workers.
This is because work cannot be partitioned and standardized. If we are divided from the work itself, we are divided from ourselves. The path through this is something you need to walk together. It is no coincidence that the big opposition moments of the Macrodata Sophistication Department are collective actions born from the individual paths of workplace radicalization (with the help of Mark's stepbrother's self-help book; You are you). Conquest begins at work, and so does radicalization. As I wrote before, this is a lesson that many workers engaged in collective action learn. I won't be involved in radicalized work. We'll be radical At workand even the smallest taste of collective action provides a powerful sense of our power.
Like reintegration, that power is brought into life outside of our work, and is not willing to take away the bad situation from others who try to exploit us as well. This helps explain why the wealthiest and most powerful people fight unionization efforts. It maintains extractive labor capitalism as its status quo. The workplace is at the heart of alienation. Because it's where we learn to be photographed. When we accept that our livelihoods exist through the immeasurable whims of C-suite, we are more likely to understand ourselves as equally passive within other unequal dynamics. . Under insurmountable student loan debt. And when workers call bullshit on the conditions of their work, it is not long before they challenge the very nature of the work itself.
You don't need to watch a science fiction show retirement You just have to go to work to realize that the workplace is the central place of soul-shattering and spiritually injustice in life. The opposite is also true. Engage in a simple pursuit that gives you something alive – eat real food, engage in unproductive hobbies like crafts, and interact with loved ones, replenish your soul and counterbalance with workplace alienation It functions as. Fully aware of the self is as difficult in our real world as the grossly fantastical world of Lumon Industries. All over the place, reintegration into the self-world brings a powerful sense of self-determination, joy and power. The taste makes us starve more.
