How far would you go to achieve a perfect work/life balance? That’s the question Apple TV’s critically acclaimed series “Severance” aimed to explore. If you’ve never heard of the Emmy Award-winning show directed by Ben Stiller, here’s the synopsis, according to Rotten Tomatoes:
“Lead character Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives; when a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.”
A recent survey by Human Resources platform People Managing People found that many viewers are more than intrigued to give the memory-splitting procedure a go. The poll of more than 200 workers across the globe revealed that almost a quarter (21%) of people say they ‘definitely would’ or ‘probably would’ be willing to accept the procedure—while a big majority (70%) of workers said they would be ‘Severed’ for a wage of $100,000 a year.
We asked People Managing People's Human Resources expert David Rice what inspired them to conduct the survey... "The series presents a dystopian workplace where people are willing to alter the function of their minds to be able to live separate lives from their work," he said. "This is an interesting time to present the survey, because increasingly people are feeling the drain on their personal lives that modern work presents and how the demands of serving capitalism have simply become too much for a lot of people."
Rice believes we're encountering a time where workers are presented with ethical dilemmas in how they experience and complete their work. AI is part of that, he says, and it's making work for a lot of people less about creativity or ingenuity and more about the volume of what they can do. The HR expert tells us it's a recipe for burnout.
"We're only a few years away from the trans-humanism movement in which things like the neura-link could change the function of human's brains and how we work. Add in the politics of the day, and it kind of feel likes we're headed toward dystopian workplace tropes you might see in shows like Severance or Black Mirror," Rice told Bored Panda. "So we wanted to see where people are with this concept given so many are struggling with things like burnout, separating work and life and overall satisfaction with what they're doing for a living. I think the results really illustrate that in a unique way."
On the topic of results, 34% of those surveyed said they would consider having the "Severance" procedure if they were paid more than $500,000. It also emerged that Gen Z is the age group most willing to undergo the procedure for money. Only 13% of 18-24-year-olds said they would not consider it. Over a third of Gen X and Millennial respondents said they either ‘definitely would’ or ‘probably would’ accept the procedure.
"There are a lot of factors at play here," says Rice. "For one, work has become increasingly demanding of people. I recently saw a poll asking how many hours on average you work and the number one answer across thousands of respondents was 50 hours."
The expert told Bored Panda that it's a significant chunk of anyone's life. But yet, for many, they're barely living pay-check to pay-check and struggling to cover the cost of living.
Rice says that when workers are giving more but getting less than what they're used to, or not the same as what previous generations experienced, it can be more than a bit demoralizing.
The HR expert stresses that AI hasn't made things any easier for the average worker. He says, if anything, it's created more frustrations. "One is the devaluation and outsourcing to a machine... Skills that people spent years cultivating that many of them built their aspirations around. And for people who pursued a career in a field and found something that they liked, seeing those opportunities disappear or at the very least change entirely in structure, that is demoralizing. There may be jobs for them in the future, but for a lot of people, they're struggling looking at AI and seeing human obsolescence as a real challenge."
Rice adds that there's also a lot of frustration around everything else in the world. "I think a lot of people have become disillusioned with employers, employment generally, and any sort of institution that is meant to provide value to society but which operates with another motive," he told us.
Rice says what surprised him the most about the survey results was the amount of people who named a price. "I thought that 'Definitely would not do it' would be the number one answer to the general question of if folks would do it or not, and it was," he explained. "But what was odd was that there seemed to be a breaking point where people's stance on that wasn't so firm."
He was taken aback that 68% of people indicated that some amount of money would entice them to do it, rather than answering with "no amount of money." "I think that says something very disheartening about people's sense of financial health and their overall wellbeing," Rice told Bored Panda. "There's a real disconnect there and they're not sure there's an answer to what they're experiencing, so they're not taking the severing of their consciousness off the table."
Rice says those in HR should learn from the results of the survey. "When you have this many people willing to split themselves in half, essentially it means there's a lot of people out there who want to forget what working for you is like," he cautioned. "Additionally, I don't know if I've ever seen a piece of data that illustrates that wages haven't kept up with inflation and we need to consider what that means for people."
Rice told us that a significant chunk of respondents said they would do the procedure for less than $200k. "That's not a lot of money," he said. "That isn't even into the territory of getting some tax breaks or really solving your financial problems. The perception that it's enough to do this says to me that people aren't feeling valued and are willing to do this to overcome some basic challenges."
