Work-life balance is a regular topic we talk about a lot.
Some people say that work hours and off hours should be separated. But if work and life are really completely cut, what will we become?
Recently, a new workplace drama with a score of 9.1, "Life Cutting", tells such a story.
The story takes place in a company called "Grace" who wants to take work-life balance to the next level.
Therefore, a "separation surgery" was developed:
By implanting a chip in the brain, the time of the hit worker is completely divided into "work mode" and "work mode".
That is to say, the one in life you will completely forget about the 8 hours of work, and all the anxieties and troubles at work;
At work, you will forget all the "irrelevant information" – including your name, your identity relationship, your goals and determinations, and your memories of your family and partner. And so on and so forth.
That's right, it really and completely realized "play hard when you play, and work hard when you work".
Such a technology, can you really accept it?
When "unknown" becomes the correct answer
Looking at the setting of "split time" alone, it may not be new in nature. After all, the balance between life and work is a long-discussed problem for workers.
However, "Life Cutting" is very fresh for the way this setting is expressed.
The first image is of a woman prostrating herself on a huge conference table. She had just finished her separation surgery and had been erased from her memories of everything that had happened to her, unaware of what had happened.
When she woke up, someone asked her a few questions:
Who are you? Where were you born? What is your lover's favorite breakfast? What color are your mother's eyes?
Unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown. Everything is strange and unknown.
After finding that she could not answer a single question, she gradually went from shock and confusion to collapse.
"Your name is Holly," said the supervisor sitting across from you, "I know you're confused about the separation surgery right now." ”
"But before we get into it, let's talk about something else. Have you ever heard of work-life balance? First, think of yourself as a seesaw..."
The uneasiness and anxiety of being manipulated surged into her heart, and she grabbed what was in front of her, smashed it at the supervisor, and loudly resisted: "Let me out!" ”
After several negotiations, he followed Holly's wishes and took her to the door of the company.
The next scene shocked all the audience.
The next second, Holly pushed open the door and walked out.
The next second, the perspective switched to Holly's first perspective—she opened the company's door again and walked back.
And this is not the "manipulation" of outsiders, everything is based on Holly's self-will.
Inside the door, Holly forgot everything in her life and just wanted to escape and rebel against this strange place;
But when she walked out of the door of the company, the memory of life immediately returned, and she suddenly remembered the reason for coming here to work, so she naturally pushed open the door of the company and returned to work.
As a result, there is a scene that seems to be "returned" by the game portal.
It's an infinite loop.
After the separation, I was still me... Do you?
Based on the setting of "separation surgery", "Life Cutting" also extends countless new contradictions.
For people who have undergone separation surgery, their selves in life have nothing to do with their selves at work. They don't communicate any emotions or feelings, just two different personalities that share the same body.
Everything is different except for looks. The living environment is different, the ideological consciousness is different, and the information received is completely different——
This makes them unsurprisingly two completely different, stranger personalities.
What is even more frightening is that the life personality and the working personality are "unequal".
Those who have higher authority are actually the personalities of life outside. It is the TA who agrees to "create" a new personality through surgery, and it is also the TA who decides whether to leave his job and completely end his work.
Even if you struggle at work and build deep relationships with your colleagues, it is not this person at all.
As people who bear the "cost of labor", Holly and her colleagues are forever left in the company as human-type work machines, without self-awareness and freedom.
I don't know what the meaning of my work is, I don't know what the company is, I don't know what my private life is, who my family and partner are.
Only when the company finds that the employee's mental condition is not good, and wants to use extreme methods to achieve the departure - for example, in order to force herself in life to achieve the departure, almost hanged herself in the elevator Holly.
In this case, the company will arrange a psychological counselor to reveal some happy life of life personality to employees as a "reward".
Of course, the psychological counselor himself has also undergone "separation surgery".
In this way, their lives are only left with no temperature, endless, seamless work, and no freedom to refuse and resist.
They killed themselves. Create a personality of oneself that does not work intermittently, without anything else, still oppressed as a tool, leaving all life for the enjoyment of the outer world.
Can only work, work constantly.
As a new recruit, Hurley has not yet been fully domesticated by the company.
When she tried to continue to resist, she was brought into the small black room by the company as a "punishment".
She needs to read the confession book continuously and repeatedly under the watchful eye of the lie detector, without the slightest perfunctory and sloppy.
In this way, she read endlessly more than a thousand times before she came out of the small dark room.
The assembly line of work content, the punishment method of extreme excess, and the use of migrant workers as part-time workers by capital;
The company's provocation of dissension between different departments, the subtle links between the inner and outer worlds, and the huge conspiracy behind it...
The horror is that this is the "ultimate imagination of the future" based on the current working state of 996 and 007:
A two-pronged "destruction" of the body and the spirit.
"Looking for that little balance"
In the imagination of the high-tech world, countless future "upgraded" associations of 996 and 007 have been generated. The separation surgery of "Life Cutting" is also a "reasonable" imagination to some extent.
Even if it is not as extreme as "Life Cutting", "how to balance work and life" is still a contradiction and problem.
In today's circumstances, the key to a complete solution to the "balance problem" may not lie in the individuals, but in the structure as a whole. For a while and a half, it is difficult for us to change the whole situation on our own.
This solution comes along, or before it comes up – if you're suffering from overwork, anxious and confused by the high degree of confusion between working hours and off-hours...
Perhaps the most effective solution in the short term is to find some "freedom" that you can grasp.
On the seesaw of pain and pleasure, try to find a small balance. It may not solve the problem completely, but at least it will give us a little bit of ease in the moment.
For example, I recently loved to watch the "Can you see your workstation" Douban group.
The group's profile reads:
"I spend about half of my life at work, and the square inch of the workstation seems to be our other habitat, watching us sigh, struggle, touch the fish... Reflect a real and vivid us. Can you show me your workstation? ”
Some are before-and-after comparisons. I just came to an empty workstation in time and space, and after a while, I was full of human work.
Some are portrayals of emotions. When you are in a good mood, add a bouquet of flowers to the table, add a new toy; when you are in a bad mood, lie on the messy workstation and touch the fish to charge, or by carefully dressing up your workstation, to achieve a kind of self-healing.
During our working hours, we also have the space to pursue a certain "freedom.".
It does not need to be a fixed, unchanging "freedom", but can be just a little different "small cure" every day, pulling us out of the "mud" of work to breathe.
Faced with an alienated life that completely ignores emotions, pull yourself back, at least in the cracks of the work to find emotions that are truly worthy of your own.
And the way to resist life being swallowed up by work may be to find, feel, and retain emotions.
Whether it's pleasure, annoyance, or occasional excitement or decadence...
At least, we still exist.
To exist, you can have hope.
Do you agree to separate working hours and life time?
Comments section, waiting for your opinion ~
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Author: Du Ye
Illustration: Wolong Pot Ba