Last week, I was nervous about a midterm for one of my classes. When I’m nervous, I tend to ramble about my fears to anyone who will listen. It wasn’t just that I was nervous about how I’d do — I wanted to speed past the anxious moments of opening an exam booklet and realizing I had no idea what I was doing.

Once I got to class, I could articulate exactly what I wanted. I wanted an “innie” to take the exam for me.

The idea of an “innie” and its opposite, an “outie,” comes from the hit Apple TV sci-fi show “Severance.” In the series, the sinister Lumon Industries has invented a medical procedure known as “severance” that splits the minds of its employees into two. The outie lives their life as usual, except that when they descend the Lumon elevator to the severed floor, they immediately leave it and go home.

At work, their innie takes over, a version of themselves whose entire life is in the office — when they go up the elevator, they immediately walk out onto the severed floor. The procedure is sold as the ultimate solution to work-life balance by creating one person who works and one who doesn’t.

In the show, the innies are described as mere extensions of their outies and are told very little about the outside world. But the characters that we follow, the Macrodata Refinement team, complicate and eventually destroy the notion that innies are the same as their outies by having their own personalities, motivations, loves and desires. The narrative on severance that both the innies and outies hear is a lie, but they cannot communicate for much of the series, as intense surveillance by Lumon prevents information sharing and solidarity between the severed halves.

As the show continues, we get a greater sense of the true intentions of Lumon. We are originally told the technology is less than a decade old, but we learn that it is likely much older. And while severance is presented as used solely by some Lumon employees for a refined work-life balance, Lumon clearly has different goals.

This turns even more eerie when we meet Gabby Arteta, wife of a Lumon-supporting senator who has severed herself to avoid the pain of childbirth. Indeed, as the series continues, the severance process only gets more sinister, and Lumon appears to be seeking a kind of global control.

The show’s theme is that severance is dangerous because it forces an unwilling person, the innie, to work only so the outie can avoid their labor. But what makes it so compelling is that many of us can relate to a desire to not work, making severance seem, while sinister, a desirable method to escape an inescapable part of life.

We do little things to lessen work and make our lives easier, whether we plug essays into ChatGPT or put off studying to engage in things we enjoy more. It is a universal desire to want more for less and to try accomplishing our goals by doing as little work as possible. We want the results of our labor without having to work for it.

As individuals become increasingly alienated from their labor, going from farming the food they eat to manufacturing items they might use to merely inputting text into online databases, we are less connected and have less access to the fruits of our labor, which we increasingly cannot access in our daily lives.

So why wouldn’t you want an escape? Why not take the route that lets you leave the office as soon as you enter and still get paid? Members of the MDR team all have different reasons for getting severed, but all experience missing eight hours of their day before leaving the elevator from the severed floor. But the issue is that this doesn’t solve the character’s alienation and instead forces someone else to perform their labor, and the only way for an innie to quit is to essentially kill themselves since their existence is tied to the severed floor.

But in that escape, you lose much more than just eight hours. It warps your perspective — when your work is easy and you can get away with the bare minimum, any increased hardship or difficulty seems insurmountable. Just as social media warps our idea of what real life is actually like, getting away with the bare minimum, whether through severance or just by not doing your readings, makes actual work seem all the harder.

This is where I’d like to return to my midterm. As I opened the question booklet, I still hoped that by some miracle, I’d open my eyes to a completed test in front of me and bypass taking it. But because this is real life, I didn’t.

Evidently, the exam wasn’t as bad as I thought. It certainly didn’t breeze by, but it wasn’t the arduous task I’d built up in my mind. It was difficult, but it also helped me make connections between topics that I hadn’t thought of before and reminded me of areas that I needed to improve.

But what would I think of the exam if I had been severed and assigned an “innie” to the task? I would still see an impossible task and I would not know my actual strengths and weaknesses, just my perceptions of them. I would not have grown and evolved but remained stagnant and unable to advance my understanding of the subject.

So, the next time you are typing in ChatGPT to give you answers or even just to provide you an easy way to start your paper — or you find yourself in the “Severance” universe and are seriously considering the procedure — pause.

You will not learn from your dependence on technology. It will only leave you as you were, insecure about your abilities and skills. Instead, rely on yourself and the myriad resources you have around you — talk to your friends, go to student support offices or consult online resources created before ChatGPT. Don’t avoid intellectual labor or difficult experiences — they shape who you are.