Would you get the 'Severance' procedure? Is work-life balance real? Tell us. | Opinion

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Your outie wants work-life balance, and Lumon Industries is here to give it to you. (Praise Kier.)

Or at least, that’s the idea behind “Severance,” which concludes its second season on Apple TV+ Friday. The show your friends can’t stop talking about has tapped into something everyone – working or not – can relate to.

For the uninitiated, “Severance” follows a team of office workers whose selves – and memories – have been divided between their work life (“innies”) and their personal life (“outies”) thanks to a surgical procedure. Innies and outies exist at the same time, but they never see or interact with each other or anyone outside of their worlds: Innie you goes to work, and outie you has no idea what you do there. (In fact, all your innie knows is work.) It's compartmentalization to the extreme and, as you can probably guess – no spoilers! – that separation doesn’t quite go as promised.

“Would you implant a chip/take a pill/have a procedure that would allow you to xyz” is a common theme in science fiction. The show’s iteration has sparked a heated debate online and left us wondering: Would you get the severance procedure? (Scroll down or click here to tell us.)

“Severance” debuted in February 2022 and was shot during the pandemic, a particularly tumultuous time for rigid corporate America. Years after COVID-19 forced many companies to go remote, millions of employees were still working from home – adding another layer to the complexities of the work-life balance debate.

When the second season started streaming this January, it was against a new backdrop of corporate culture. Some of the most well-known and formerly work-from-home friendly companies, including JPMorgan Chase and Amazon, now want employees back in the office.

Federal employees weren’t exempt from this, either. The Trump administration ordered thousands of workers to return to office as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency began their layoffs.

But hybrid work remains on the rise, and remote work – in some form – looks to be here to stay. New data from WFH Research shows that all workers are working from home an average of 1.4 days a week, and 43% of offices have implemented a hybrid structure.

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It seems companies are giving their people what they want: A Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of people who work from home would leave their jobs if they were forced to go back to the office. And it’s not just employees who benefit. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that as remote work increases, productivity increases. I think they call that a win-win?  

At Paste BN, a lot of us are watching and talking about “Severance” and its commentary on our relationship to work and ourselves, the innie vs. outie of it all. We want to know what you think:

• Do you feel like you have a healthy work-life balance?
• What should companies do to better support their employees in their pursuit of this?
• Do you think work from home is working?
• What makes an ideal working environment – and a bad one?

Take our latest Forum survey below or send us an email to forum@usatoday.com with the subject line “Forum work life balance.” We’ll publish perspectives from all sides in an upcoming column.

Is it even possible to have a work-life balance? Tell us.

Janessa Hilliard is the director of audience for Opinion at Gannett.