"Severance" and The Unspeakable Time of the Workday
It's not only that we don't want to speak of our workdays, we can't.
Most people can't tell you what happened last Wednesday at work, not because nothing happened, but because whatever happened is not worth telling.
Moreover, whatever happened can't be shaped into meaningful stories.
For most people I know, including myself, workdays are a source of so much preoccupation and anxiety, but the moment we're free of them, say, during our time off, our natural tendency is to completely forget about them. Seal them off. Never speak of them again. That is—until Monday.
This is how we protect our personal time.
It reminds me of the show Severance, where employees consent to undergo a futuristic procedure to deliberately forget what they did at the office. It's supposed to help them achieve a better work-life balance, and leave stress behind during work hours.
But in the show, as in our real lives, what gets severed off from our lives when we fail to narrate what happened at work are not just the stories, but time itself. This is how it starts to feel like days are rushing by, and we never have enough time for anything else.
Because time is not just the seconds of a clock. Time is composed of narratives.
Time Is Not The Seconds. It's The Stories.
"...Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence." - Paul Ricoeur
We typically think of time as the seconds, minutes, days, months, and years that pass by in the background. We may even conceive of it as having to do with the rotation of our planet and its revolutions around the Sun. But all this is just "cosmological" time and doesn't really mean anything by itself. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues that abstract cosmological time only transforms into lived, human time when we can structure it as a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. A narrative with a plot. Without a plot, our experience of time remains fragmented.
This structuring of events into a meaningful plot, which he calls emplotment, is necessary for time to be intelligible.
And life is always in danger of being unintelligible because it is filled with so many almost random, confused events that beg for coherence. You work. Your company goes under. You lose your job. Someone you know somehow wins a prize, but not you. Your dog dies. You gain a new friend you didn't expect to find. Suddenly, your country's at war. All of these things can happen to you, and without a plot that connects the dots, you're bound to lose your mind.
Thankfully, people are natural storytellers. To Ricoeur, they can even be likened to poets making "discordant" events "concordant." From this baffling array of events, they can weave out a narrative that integrates the past, present, and future.
In this way, we can tell ourselves that something caused something else. That things don't just happen randomly and for no reason at all, but that they follow a logical sequence—this is the arrow of time.
So, for example, you might say, "I lost my job because the current state of the economy is particularly harsh for my company's business, and so I got laid off because it was the company's policy to lay off the newest employees first. Unfortunately, I was one." This narrative is vastly more appealing and kinder than just saying to ourselves that "I lost my job because, well, things happen randomly."
This is not just a story. This itself is time.
It is not arbitrary clock time, but human time—meaningful lived time that we can use to make sense of ourselves and our lives. The truth is, this is the only way we can truly experience time and nothing else. Even when we say "Time passed between 9am and 5pm," what we're really describing are the meaningful actions and events that happened one after another during that span.
We Don't Lose Time. We Lose the Ability to Speak of It.
We crave meaning. A sense of purpose. A feeling of being enriched deeply, individually. "Man cannot stand a meaningless life," Carl Jung said.
It's easy to see that not everything we do typically conveys a sense of meaning, even if it can be accounted for. We can account for everything we do at work: what tasks we did, the progress of each project, and so on, so forth. But while our actions can be itemized, it's a struggle to structure them into a meaningful plot without bad faith.
Perhaps what's making emplotment of work so hard to do is that the process requires us to reconcile so many things that are at odds with each other. We want to improve our lives through work, but we’re often underpaid. We want to create, but we're assigned mindless tasks. We want to succeed, but the game is rigged. We would need to consciously and consistently shut out rational thinking to make all of this make sense. A certain kind of detachment is needed to fool ourselves that it's even worth it.
This is what Marx calls alienated labor. It's a condition where workers are estranged from the act of production and from others, stifling their natural creativity and overall potential. It's the logical outcome of an economic system that works against workers.
But as we can see, alienated labor also resists narrative.
This is how work time loses its ability to be spoken of.
It's not only that we don't want to speak of our workdays, we can't.
We say, "Where did the time go?" "I can’t believe it’s been that long." "Time flies."
But it's not time that we lose, it's the ability to speak of it. There are no intelligible plots where meaning is nonexistent. Consequently, there is no time.
We don't need Severance's futuristic technology to silence work time. It is already, by default, unspeakable. We don't have to split ourselves into an "innie" and an "outtie" to compartmentalize our stress, anxiety, maybe even our trauma. We are already, with the way we feel about our jobs and how we quarantine them like something infected, hopelessly severed.
A Picture of a Utopia of Work Time
Not all work is so loathsome that it can't be put into words and give us meaning.
A few of us have rewarding work that enriches us creatively and socially, and compensates us fairly.
But that's just the thing. In an ideal world, all of us, not just a few, would have more narratives to tell about our jobs. How they enriched our personal lives, day to day, year after year. In such a world, maybe there's not even a need to tell which is personal time, and which is work time, because the stories of how we work do not need to be severed off like a contaminated part of our being. They would simply be part of our ongoing narrative to a better understanding of ourselves.
But there's no simple way to move from the way things are to this utopia. Perhaps for now, it's enough that we know that this is not how it's supposed to be.
Work must be something we think of fondly and cherish. Not the opposite. And that challenge must be equally posed to ourselves as workers, and to the people who employ us.
What we want is a full awareness and experience of time. So that when we look in the mirror, we won't be surprised at the old face staring back. We won't feel like we blinked and decades passed. Because we'd know we lived a full life brimming with lessons that we'd be happy to tell anyone who's in for a good story.