Your Innie Memes and Your Outie Memes are reaction memes inspired by Severance that comment on people’s lives as they pertain to work and who they are outside of work. The inside joke comes from the premise of the hit AppleTV+ series.
Meme basics:
- Meme Creator: @antreobot/X
- Meme Type: Usable, Reaction
- First Appearance: March 2022
- Origin Source: X
- Peak Popularity: March 2025
Severance is one of the biggest shows on AppleTV+ right now, becoming the most-watched series in Apple history before its second season finished airing. Ben Stiller serves as executive producer and directs select episodes. The cast includes some big names, including Adam Scott, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Patricia Arquette.
The sci-fi psychological thriller series follows employees of the biotechnological group Lumon. The company works on highly confidential accounts, which suggests severing a person’s work identity and personal identity. In this case, doing so is a means to further protect classified details these projects entail—or so it’s posed.
What is Severance about?
The show follows a group of Lumon employees who have undergone the “Severance Procedure.” As a result of the procedure, their consciousness and memory are divided into two parts, meaning a slew moral and ethical dilemmas come into play. This has become more evident as the show has progressed. The unfolding plot hinted those who have had the procedure live quite vulnerable, delicate existences as Outies.
Much of the action serves around Mark (Scott), who Lumon shows special interest in though we don’t know why. Mark becomes increasingly paranoid. The eerie, almost cultlike environment at Lumon is showing cracks in the outie world. People are working on stopping severance and making reintegration (the reuniting of innie and outie into a single consciousness) possible.
What is an Innie on Severance?
A person’s Innie talks is the person they are inside of their workplace. The Innie’s day begins and ends with the first and last action of their workday — taking the elevator into and out of the office.
An Innie’s whole life is work, meaning they’re unaware of anything in the outside world, from the date to their location. They also have no memories of their past, making them a blank slate on which a professional value has been imposed. Innies have the curiosity to wonder about their Outie and come to grow troubled about not knowing what the other segment of their life entails.
What is an Outie on Severance?
On the other hand is the Outie, who only lives the events of a person’s personal life. The Outie is the imagined state of an Innie. The Outie is the person who consented to be severed. While it seems like they’d be happy with the decision they made, it weighs on them in ways that you might not expect. Outies have to live with having no knowledge of their behavior or attitudes during a significant portion of life.
Outies also live with the awareness that society doesn’t agree with severance as a concept. They know that other people believe the procedure is ethically unjust
Innies vs Outie
An Outie can be imagined by an Innie, but an Outie isn’t aware of their Innie. They might be curious about the idea of the workday at Lumon, but they can’t connect it to themselves, understanding it as something that happens to other people. Some Outies don’t even consider Innies to be real. More about this dynamic has been revealed as the plot of the show has unfolded over two seasons.
“Your Innie will have work friends and will make money for you during the work day and will basically be you, but they’re you without any personal memories,” one Reddit post explains.
“An Outie is your counterpart in the non-work world… You have no recollection of what you did during your 8-hour workday. And you continue to live out your ‘normal’ life,” the Redditor explains.
Meme origin and spread
Since Severance premiered in February 2022, Your Innie and Your Outie memes have increased in popularity. A few weeks after its premiere, the memes first started to appear across Twitter and Reddit.
In late 2022, a particular Your Outie meme enjoyed popularity. The image is of Dichen Lachman as Gemma. Different scenes focusing on her are used as the base of these Your Outie memes. In them, Gemma informs you of Your Outie’s actions in a way that ranges from mundane (“Your Outie returns a stray grocery cart”) to insane (“Your Outie can name all 1025 pokémon”).
Recent popularity
Severance touches on themes relevant to our current political and cultural climate in 2025. It shows the way corporate culture pushes the limits of capitalism and the way it impacts and changes life dynamics outside of the workplace. The more a person buys into the promises of capitalism, the more they find themselves alienated from a life outside of it.
Innie/Outie discourse online very closely mirrors the discussions of work/life balance that have permeated popular culture over the last decade. Jokes about work spouses and work friends take on new meaning, opening up conversations about identity and how this seemingly alternative universe isn’t as far off from our own as you might think.
In January 2025, the second season of Severance came out. This reignited conversations about Innies and Outies and with that comes memes discussing the two.
Meme examples
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