Lumon is this creepy, fictional company from the show ‘Severance‘ on Apple TV.
Imagine a giant, all-powerful corporation. In the show, it was supposedly founded way back in 1865 and has offices everywhere, giving you this feeling that you can’t escape it.
What does Lumon actually do?
Lumon Industries is a biotech company, and its main product is this procedure called ‘Severance.’ The whole idea is that they implant a chip in their employees’ brains that completely splits their lives in two:
- Your ‘Outie’: This is your normal life—home, family, friends.
- Your ‘Innie’: This is your life only at work.
The catch is, your ‘Innie’ at work has absolutely no idea who you are on the outside, and your ‘Outie’ at home has zero memory of what they did all day at the office. They are literally two different people in one body.
Of course, Lumon sells this to the public as the ‘perfect work-life balance’ (you know, leave work and totally forget about it). But really, it’s just a terrifying tool for control. You don’t even know what you’re doing for 8 hours a day!
Features of Lumon Industries
The office itself is a whole other thing.
It’s sterile, windowless, and full of endless white hallways. Employees are sorted into different departments and have no idea what the other departments do (or even what they really do, for that matter). For example, the main characters just ‘sort scary numbers’ on a screen, with no idea why.
Inside, the company is like a cult. They have weird rules, their own jargon, and basically worship the founder. It feels like a totalitarian system where people just mindlessly follow instructions.
What Lumon means to you
Lumon is essentially a big metaphor for modern corporate life. The show points out that your job might be totally meaningless, but the most important thing for the company is having total control over you.
It really makes you think:
- Can you even stay human when your job eats your personality?
- What are we willing to put up with just to have a ‘stable’ job?
- And if your personality is split like that, who actually owns that second, ‘work’ half of you?
It’s not just sci-fi; it’s a reflection of our fears about these massive, powerful corporations.
By the way, fun fact
There’s actually a real company in Germany called Lumon Industries.
It’s almost certainly a coincidence, but still… creepy.
Check their Google reviews → they often have a very high rating—something like 4.8 out of 5 stars. So, if they are secretly offering the “Severance” procedure, it looks like their German customers are very happy with it!
In all seriousness, they probably just sell windows or something. But the coincidence is still… creepy.
Bottom line
Lumon Industries is a fictional company from a science fiction series that shows how work in modern corporations blurs the boundaries of personality. “Severance” makes us ask the question—whose life is actually mine?