The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [38]
Dexter tried it. He even made it work, for a while. If you go back to the early seasons, it’s pretty clear that the life he set up for himself was one where his work activities—visiting and modeling crime scenes, writing reports, meeting with his coworkers—remained, by design and necessity, separate from his non-work activities. Even when apparent bleed-over exists, as when he went out for drinks with Batista or Vince, or when he took part in the bowling team, for Dexter this wasn’t bleed-over. None of that was “personal” to him. It was all work, because everything he did to protect his ability to hunt and kill to satisfy his Dark Passenger was work.
As such, Dex has a huge advantage on the rest of us. He can draw a very solid line in his life. The things on one side of it are the things that he does to enable him to feed his need to kill. The things on the other side are all part of the killing.
I would doubt, however, that most of us are all that interested in an “advantage” that stems from sitting in a pool of mom’s blood in a cargo crate, then growing up into a person who is (nearly) incapable of feeling emotions.
Making segmentation work almost requires a mental switch that we can turn on and off at will. When it’s on, we’re one person. When it’s off, we’re someone else. Without emotions, and with the code to guide him, Dexter can manage this kind of segmentation. For those of us who lack the emotional detachment that allows Dexter to be both a serial killer and a functioning member of normal-appearing society, it’s much more difficult.
There are situations in which this is possible without the type of pathology we see in Dexter. Jobs that are not cognitively or emotionally demanding, in which we have no responsibilities for or to other people except those we have in the moment, are ones that can be left behind at the end of the day. Such jobs are vanishingly rare, though, and soon may be limited to entry-level service and retail jobs and those that primarily involve manual labor.
Technology alone makes it difficult to keep our work and non-work lives separate. The various brands of “electronic leashes” we carry on our belts or in our pockets make us reachable anywhere and everywhere. The number of places we can go to shelter ourselves from the demands of coworkers and bosses shrinks a little more every day—we can’t even take shelter on airplanes any more, since they became Wi-Fi enabled! Society itself works against segmentation, and despite our best attempts, we will find ourselves bringing work home with us. Trying to keep our family problems out of the workplace is similarly problematic. Sick kids, text messages and emails from friends or family members during work hours, and community volunteering—all of these are enabled by technology, just like intrusions of the office at the dinner table.
Even Dexter isn’t immune. His ability to segment his work and non-work lives was challenged for the first time by his brother, the Ice Truck Killer, and how Dexter’s relationship with Debra put her life in jeopardy. Dexter’s work with Frank Lundy (and Debra’s relationship with Lundy) further strained his ability to keep work and non-work separate, and his friendship-cum-mentorship of Miguel Prado threatened to obliterate the boundary Dex established between his work and his killings.
In the end, what do we know about the segmentation model? We know that it’s an interesting idea, and something that we can strive for. Unfortunately, a hard separation between work and non-work requires (a) little or no emotional involvement in work, (b) a job low enough in complexity to make leaving it behind feasible and, at the very least, not undesirable, and/or (c) significant psychopathology. In a world where BlackBerrys and iPhones and email make us accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, true segmentation of work and non-work