Severance
Date: 2026-10-19
I recently watched a tv show called Severance. The central plot of the show revolves about a split in memory induced by a brain implant which allows office workers to have a clean separation about work and life (funny how that’s meant to be disjoint). The separation at memory level means that the during office hours, a person has no recollection about their working hours when outside the office, and vice versa. This effectively leads to a split personality where the same person can take on a different outlook or perspective as their interactions differ. I thought the central theme was quite differnt from what I had watched before. It also felt close to home as I have recently started working in industry and transitioning from a graduate school lifestyle. This means maintaining a stable routine, and learning new things about “office life”. Many a times I have waddled back home on the bus still deep in thought about the day’s office events, or some problem I am working on. It has been a rough learning experience to actually dissociate from the day’s events and sever back into my personal life.
What’s funny is that quite often, regular working days do end up feeling like you have to lock in and just empty out your brain’s scratchpad for the office work. With the use of ai tooling there is nuance to how much productive you can really be unless you are willing to offload and mange the surge in context. But on the other hand, the more distant you are to the work being done (in terms of truly understanding it or writing about it), the more longing you get to truly understand it and the unease that accompanies it stays back even after you leave office. The rapid iteration and self-induced tinkering expectation then means that the severance switch is only effective 1-way! We are living in interesting times with the progress in large language models surpassing even the wildest of expectations. For this new normal to even remotely feel normal I guess a mental shift in our attitude towards the value that we derive from our work is in oder.
I do not have a satisfactory solution for myself yet and no, the analogy to compilers and assembly code do not translate here 1-1 in my uninformed, and reactionary opinion. At some level we are indeed severing ourselves from the end product of our labour and that feels discomforting, even if software and research were already many levels of separation away from real-world observable output unlike nurses or teachers. Perhaps there is a middle ground that indeed gives the productivity boost in tinkering without the baggage of feeling like a severed person prompting things into a black box! As with any boom-bust cycle, it will be a quite amusing to see what new standards in terms of work-life this era will bring in. I guess we all wanted to live in interesting times, well we have it now! Maybe over the next decade we as a collective figure out better ways or maybe the stock market decides for all us what the equlibrium should be. The journey towards exploring and navigating this paradigm shift continues…