At his job at an apparel store in SoHo, Thomas Lanese uses phrases that he would never utter outside of a work setting, like, “I’ll shoot this email to you by end of day.” Sometimes, he said, it feels like he is living two separate lives.
It is something fans of “Severance” might relate to. In the buzzy show that concludes its second season on Apple TV+ next week, the characters literally live two distinct lives.
Their “innies” (no relation to belly buttons) are their work selves. Their “outies” exist anywhere outside of work. They have chosen to work for Lumon Industries, a biotech company where they are “severed” from their personal lives, and their innies and outies have no idea what’s going on in each other’s worlds.
The terms have now found a life outside the show, with innie used as a shorthand for being at work. Your innie can’t stop eating free candy in the office even though your outie is trying to cut back on sugar. Your innie wears unsexy clothes like knee-length pencil skirts even though your outie wears crop tops and miniskirts. And your outie parties late at night because your innie has to deal with the hangovers.
“When you’re at work, you kind of put on this different facade than you do at home or you do with your friends,” said Mr. Lanese, a 26-year-old sales associate and game designer. In January, he posted a satirical video on TikTok remaking a scene from the first season of “Severance” that has received almost three million views. In it, his innie is visibly disgusted as he discovers cringe traits about his outie. For example, his outie has run three Disney 5Ks as Mickey Mouse. He captioned it “realizing that your innie would not be friends with your outie.”
“It’s almost a form of disassociating,” Mr. Lanese said.
The desire to separate work life from home life has long been a subject of discourse, with some, like Mr. Lanese, trying to compartmentalize the two. The show takes this sentiment to an extreme: Lumon presents severance as a way to free oneself from difficult emotions or experiences, seemingly granting employees a literal work-life balance. Mark (Adam Scott), for example, chooses to be severed so that he can escape the pain of his wife’s death at work. (Ultimately, his innie and outie share core truths, and the pain manages to seep through in unexpected ways.)
But even beyond using the term as a shorthand for being at work, severance can apply to any form of compartmentalization of self.
“It’s any kind of separation of self from something that’s uncomfortable versus something that’s not uncomfortable,” said Adam Aleksic, a linguist who wrote a book called “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.”
“I was on a very uncomfortable, choppy boat ride with some friends and they were joking that the innie version of ourselves have to experience this boat ride so that the outie version of ourselves can enjoy the island later,” Mr. Aleksic said. “It’s a way of coping.”
According to Mr. Aleksic, the second season of the popular sci-fi drama has created “a cultural moment that we haven’t had in a while,” with innie and outie joining a list of pop culture expressions that come from various forms of entertainment. For instance, the term “friend zone” came from the show “Friends.” “Debbie Downer” came from “Saturday Night Live.” “Gaslight” came from the 1944 film “Gaslight.” Even going back to Shakespeare, phrases like “wild goose chase” and “in a pickle” came from the poet and have become ingrained in our vocabulary.
“Our language really is built on this broad tapestry of intertextual connections ranging from Shakespeare to the show ‘Friends,’” Mr. Aleksic said, citing the role of media in shaping our language.
“It’s very, very possible that we could internalize the phrases ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ at a point where a hundred years from now, people are still using it, drawing from this media reference that was culturally important at one time,” he added.
He said he thought these phrases had staying power because they described compartmentalizing selves in a colloquial way that had not existed before. Though there is language like “true self” and “code switch,” those phrases sound more clinical.
“Usually, in linguistics, when something applies well to an idea that we haven’t had before, those words are more likely to stick,” he said. “I feel like it’s the best way we have of describing compartmentalized versions of ourselves, which are more and more important in a society where we’re discontent with who we are.”
Zoë Rose Bryant, a writer from Elkhorn, Neb., said that now more than ever, the disassociation inherent in the innie and outie dynamic was appealing “because it feels like the world is on fire most days, and there’s definitely a desire to turn all of that off and tune it out entirely.”
Ms. Bryant, 25, had shared a post on X about having separate social media accounts for the public and for friends that read, “Switching between main and priv kinda feels like i’m in severance transitioning from my innie to my outie.”
Some companies have already adopted the language on social media as well.
On X, the Denver International Airport posted a photograph of an airplane taking off with a message that read: “This is a sign for your innie to book your outie a vacay. You both deserve it.”
And on Hilton’s TikTok page, a post read: “My innie working their silly little job so my outie can book a vacation in Mexico.”
Mr. Aleksic said brands hopping on any social media trend was inevitable these days.
“Sometimes it ends up killing it,” he said. “It’s hard to tell in advance whether something will stick.”
