Lumon Industries

Welcome to Lumon. Please enjoy each day equally.

I've watched a lot of TV villains in my time. Megalomaniac drug lords. Serial killers with tragic backstories. Demons from hell dimensions.

None of them scared me like Lumon Industries.

Because Lumon is real. Not literally—but every corporation that treats employees as resources rather than humans, that hides exploitation behind wellness programs and mission statements, that creates systems so byzantine that no individual feels responsible for harm... that's Lumon.

Kier Eagan founded the company on principles that read like self-help platitudes until you realize they're the tenets of a religion. His descendants run the board. His portrait hangs in every hallway. And somewhere in the building, in the "Perpetuity Wing," his legacy is being preserved in ways we don't yet understand.

The severance procedure is the ultimate expression of corporate control. You think you're achieving work-life balance. What you're actually doing is creating a slave inside yourself—an "innie" who works eight hours a day with no memory of anything else, no hope, no outside relationships, no sense of time passing.

Your innie has never seen the sun.

Your innie doesn't know they have a family.

Your innie exists only to work.

And you did this to them voluntarily.

What Lumon understands—and what makes them terrifying—is that good people will do terrible things if the system tells them to.

No one at Lumon thinks they're evil. That's the point.

Mr. Milchick genuinely believes the Eagan teachings. He's not pretending—he's a true believer who sees himself as helping employees find purpose. When he puts someone in the Break Room for hours of psychological torture, he thinks he's providing correction.

The Board operates at such a remove from ground-level harm that they probably don't even conceptualize what they're doing as harmful. It's all metrics and reports. "Macrodata Refinement efficiency is up 3%." The fact that humans are being mind-wiped and experimented on is abstracted away.

And the severed workers themselves? They've been conditioned to find meaning in meaningless work. Mark S. and his team sort "scary numbers" into bins all day. They don't know what the numbers represent. They don't know if their work matters. But they've been told it's "mysterious and important," and that has to be enough.

This is how atrocities happen in the real world. Not through cartoon villainy, but through systems that distribute responsibility so widely that no one feels accountable.

Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. Apple TV+ made a show about it.

The most insidious thing about Lumon is that their victims participate in their own destruction.

Consider Gemma Scout. She "died" in a car crash—or so her husband Mark believes. But Gemma isn't dead. She's been severed and repurposed as Ms. Casey, a wellness counselor who helps other severed workers cope with their existence.

Ms. Casey has no memory of being Gemma. She doesn't know she had a husband who loved her, a life outside these walls. She exists only during work hours, then is "paused"—essentially turned off—when not needed.

Is Gemma alive? Is Ms. Casey a new person? These questions don't have clean answers. And that ambiguity is part of Lumon's genius.

Then there's the Break Room. When a severed employee misbehaves, they're sent to read a "sincere apology" to a recording of themselves until the system detects genuine remorse. This can take hours. Days. It's psychological torture, but because it leaves no physical marks and is technically "voluntary" (the innie can stop any time by admitting wrongdoing), it exists in legal gray areas.

Petey tried to escape. He underwent black-market reintegration—reconnecting his innie and outie memories. The process drove him to seizures and death. Even in death, his body was valuable to Lumon. They offered to pay for the funeral.

Everything has a price. Everything can be bought. Everything serves the company's interests.

That's how Lumon kills. Not with violence, but with systems. With consent forms. With smiles.