severance

Severance, Global Edition: The World’s Favorite New Exit Strategy
By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism

The word “severance” once belonged to HR paperwork and polite euphemisms like “rightsizing.” Now, courtesy of an Apple TV+ show about surgically splitting workers’ memories, it has become a planetary Rorschach test—everyone sees the same inkblot, but each nation colors it with its own neuroses. From Berlin boardrooms to Jakarta call centers, the series has mutated into a mirror darkly reflecting local labor pathologies. If you squint, the whole planet looks like Lumon Industries with worse lighting.

In the United States, the show arrived as a soothing bedtime story: imagine, a job you literally cannot take home with you. For a workforce that has spent three years toggling between Zoom and existential dread, voluntary amnesia sounds less like dystopia and more like a perk—finally, a dental plan for the soul. HR consultants in Silicon Valley have begun to ask, with the casual tone normally reserved for snack options, “Could we beta-test a severance floor?” One start-up is already offering reversible hippocampal splits to coders who can’t stop dreaming in Python. It’s yoga for the overworked id; namaste and forget.

Cross the Atlantic and severance takes on the sour whiff of déjà vu. Europeans remember when “jobs for life” were an actual thing, not a punch line. Germans watch the show shivering at the thought of their famed work-life balance dissolving into corporate lobotomy. Meanwhile, the French have turned it into dinner-party satire: “At least our riots are still unionized.” The European Parliament briefly considered a non-binding resolution condemning “neurological employer overreach” before adjourning for a four-hour lunch. If hypocrisy burned calories, Brussels would be a ghost town.

In East Asia, where overtime has its own fragrance, the show lands like an aspirational TED talk. South Korea’s MZ generation—already fluent in nunchi, crypto, and silent despair—has adopted the term “severance chic.” Cosmetic clinics in Gangnam now market “micro-forgetting” injections that erase the last fiscal quarter from short-term memory. Japan, ever the perfectionist, frets that the procedure might leave a bow unexecuted at precisely 45 degrees. China’s answer is more direct: a state-backed app that auto-deletes any memory of unpaid wages. Social credit score increases if you rate the experience five stars.

The Global South, meanwhile, views the fantasy with the weary amusement of people who have long practiced severance the old-fashioned way—by migrating. Indian call-center employees already partition identities to serve angry Texans at 3 a.m.; forgetting is built into the accent training. Filipino domestic workers in Dubai keep a mental severance drawer labeled “family guilt.” For them, the show’s elevator that dings between selves isn’t sci-fi; it’s Tuesday.

Yet the broader significance is unmissable: the world’s workers are flirting with voluntary psychic fragmentation because the alternative—changing late-stage capitalism—seems even more far-fetched. Climate collapse looms, pensions evaporate, and TikTok teaches us dances for layoffs. Under such conditions, carving off eight hours of memory feels pragmatic, like installing storm windows on a burning house. Employers, ever alert to cost savings, adore the idea: no burnout if the worker who burns isn’t legally the same person at 5:01 p.m. HR departments can downsize grief itself.

International law, hilariously, hasn’t caught up. The ILO still classifies “mental severance” somewhere between “telecommuting” and “witchcraft.” Courts from Toronto to Tbilisi are scrambling to decide whether the severed self qualifies for overtime or merely for existential hazard pay. Spoiler: the corporation wins, appeals to the Hague, and settles for coupons.

So we arrive at the conclusion, polished and professionally bleak: Severance is not a cautionary tale anymore; it’s a menu option. The planet’s workforce, exhausted and atomized, is auditioning to be its own understudy. And the kicker? The procedure is reversible only until the quarterly earnings call. After that, memory—like everything else—belongs to the brand.

Sleep tight, wage earners. The elevator is on its way down.