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Brian Lehrer: Listeners, thanks for your calls engaging on that, but we're going to clear the board and set up our final question for the final 15 minutes of the show today. It's a call in on your work-life separation. Here's a hypothetical. If you could forget everything about work, when you're home and off duty, would you do it or in real life, how separate do you keep your work life and your home life? How much do you talk about home when you're at work? How much do you talk about work when you're at home? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Is this an issue in your life? This question is inspired by the Apple TV show Severance.

Have you seen it? The premise is that a big fictional corporation, Lumen, voluntarily implants chips in their worker's brains so that their work selves and their home selves know nothing about each other. Would you like to do that if that was a real thing? 212-433-WNYC. I know it's like the zombie apocalypse Shelly was just talking about, but if it was real, 212-433-9692, would you like that? When employees go home in that fictional show, they have no recollection of what they've done all day at the office, and when they get back to work, they have no idea who they are at home.

We should add that Lumen is asking their employees to do some not so savory thing, which is also part of the premise of the show, but that dystopian premise got us thinking, how much do you separate your work and home life, and with the pandemic, for some people, ablating work-life differential, is there anyone out there who is still able to keep those parts of your lives completely separate? Why do you prefer it that way? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Do you have a job you don't like, and therefore, you don't want to bring those problems home with you or is your job too technical, and so your spouse and your kids don't really want to hear about it, you assume, or is it your work self who doesn't like to talk about your home self? Maybe you think talking about your relationship or your kids makes your coworkers think differently about you. If you try to keep your work life and your home life completely separate, why do you do it? How do you do it? Would you like to do it? 212-433-WNYC, we'll take your calls after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. All right, anybody watching that Apple TV series Severance? Or in real life, if you could forget everything about work when you're home and off duty, would you do it, or how much do you already do it? Lois in Hopewell Junction, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lois.

Lois: Hi, how you doing? Thank you for taking my call. I work now Monday through Friday in a New York State Department of Corrections Maximum Security Jail. When I'm off duty, I am surprised, especially from Friday night to Sunday night and getting up Monday morning that I have completely forgotten. I just have to let it all go because of the things that go on in the environment that I work. It's not all the time, but there's certainly enough incidents of it that I need to back up and forget and even just forget that I go through gates that lock behind me and lock me in, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, Lois, and we did have to bleep you there. You said one of those words you cannot say on the radio, so listeners, if you heard a little gap or a little glitch, that was why we had to activate what we call the dump button, but what an extreme story you tell, Lois. What an extreme story Lois tells of going into work in that kind of environment. It sounds like she does try or even doesn't have to try to forget about it in her time off. Interesting. Pat on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Pat.

Pat: Hi. My point is this, it's very difficult to separate. Personally, I'm a very loyal and conscientious type. I excel in everything that I do and one point I wanted to make [crosstalk]-

Brian Lehrer: If you say so yourself.

Pat: -if I wanted to take a day off, I have to think about work when my project is due, what time it's due. I have to plan around that. You don't have two or three persons to replace you while you are out. If I die tomorrow, I'll definitely be replaced, don't get me wrong, but because of the conscientiousness and accountability, and I know what I'm responsible for, it's difficult to separate the two because that work kicks in. To think about work kicks in in terms of when what's due, when I can be off from work, et cetera. It's part of my planning.

Brian Lehrer: Would you separate more if you could?

Pat: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Pat, thank you very much. Josh in White Plains, you're on WNYC. Hi, Josh.

Josh: Hey, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Tell us your story.

Josh: My job is very much on the topic. I have a sales job, I own a franchise of a larger corporation and it's a sales job where I sell maintenance supplies and it's very cut and dry. I start work at 8:00, by the time two, three o'clock rolls around, my customers have already left work and there's nobody there to call me, so it's very easy to shut it down. I go home, I do my paperwork. I have a home office that I work out of. The whole business is based off my cell phone. If someone calls me and I don't want to take the call, I don't take the call. It's very easy to separate the home life thing.

It's not the most exciting job in the world, so there's not much to talk about when I get home at the end of the day anyway. That's it. It's just it's very easy to separate the two. I haven't seen the show on Apple TV because my free membership ran out, so I haven't actually gotten to see it yet.

Brian Lehrer: Josh, thank you very much. Rebecca in Columbia, South Carolina, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hey, how's it going? I'm actually originally from White Plain, so hey, Josh. [chuckles] I'm a journalist and I have tried to make a concerted effort to strike a good work-life balance and journalists are known for being workaholics. It's something that I noticed was causing me a lot of stress at my last job, so at my new job, I've really tried to leave work at work. A lot of my friends are also journalists and I get a lot of shame from them telling me that I don't work hard enough or that I'm not enough of a workaholic because I'm not constantly talking about work when we're at happy hour or because I'm not writing as many stories as maybe I could be because I'm prioritizing things that I have to do in my personal life instead.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Why do you think you are different than some other people in your field?

Rebecca: I think maybe I've just taken the time to think about it. The last journalism job that I had was very, very high stress and I noticed it was taking a toll on my mental health. I think after that, I made just a point to try and separate myself worth from my work because if you're constantly, I guess, tying how good of a person you are and how moral of a person you are to the quality of your work, you're never going to be satisfied with who you are as a person. Obviously, that's difficult to explain to people who have been doing this their whole lives, but I guess I've just taken the time out to think about it, especially during the pandemic where things slowed down a lot.

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca, thank you so much. Morgan in Maplewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Morgan.

Morgan: Hi Brian, how are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Morgan: My husband and I work together, we own our own small business, we're dog walkers, and that means that work is never really far from our mind. Generally, I don't mind that because I love what I do and I love dogs, but we've had to work really hard at establishing some sense of boundaries because we wake up to text messages from clients. I get text messages late at night, I get emails, and then we have to do all the other administrative stuff associated with our job when we're not walking. It's tough and I think any other small business owner can really relate to all of the background work that follows you home.

Brian Lehrer: I imagine as a couple who works together, it's a particular kind of challenge. Do you ever make an agreement with each other to, "Okay, we're going to set aside this period of time where we are not going to talk about our business," or anything like that?

Morgan: Yes, and also time off is something that we really struggled with in the beginning. The first year of our business, I don't know that we gave ourselves any time off, and now we're finally at the point where we're taking two weeks off once in the winter, once in the summer because we just realized if we didn't make time for ourselves the priority, no one was going to tell us to take the time off.

That's the hard thing, our clients are great, but people will schedule you, schedule you, schedule you, and so you have to self advocate and you have to take that time.

Brian Lehrer: Morgan, thank you very much. In the case of the couples working together, it's a little like when two parents go on a date to get some alone time away from the kids and they talk about the kids the entire time. We actually had this come up on the show in a segment on parenting not that long ago. Go on a date with your spouse and decide you are not going to talk about the kids for X period of time. It's hard to do, but I guess if you work with your spouse, then you have to at least think about setting the same kinds of boundaries with respect to your work. Lacey in Bed-Stuy, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lacey.

Lacey: Hey, Brian. I work in the wine business, and it's such an integral part of my life when I'm working and when I'm not working. I work for a really small team of four people. I vacation with them. I'm good friends with clients and colleagues, and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Brian Lehrer: Do you ever think about-- You know what? I don't have time to ask you that question and get a good answer, so I'm going to leave it there, but I'm going to sneak in one more. Philip in Princeton, you have 30 seconds. Hi, Philip.

Philip: Oh, hi, how are you doing, Brian? Thank you very much. I have a strong objection to the core of the question because that's not who we are. Actually, humanities is something very, very different of some kind of robot, chip in the head and switching to be robot and human and robot and human. That's basically what I want to say. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Okay, we will leave it there and we thank you for all of your calls on canceling your work life when you're at home, canceling your home life when you're at work. The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, MaryEileen Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on our daily podcast. We had Juliana Fonda and Miyan Levenson at the audio controls today. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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