TWO PHONE DISINTEGRATION

I always start my mentoring sessions by calendaring the next meeting. It would be simpler to have a standing day and time with each man, but I find that to be impossible with men who are scrambling to keep all the plates spinning in their lives. I do not wait until the end of the session because I will forget, so the best practice is to get our phones out and schedule before we get to the meat of the session.

About ten years ago one of my guys pulled two phones out of his pocket to schedule. I was curious why a man would carry two phones when all he needed was one.

“Why do you have two phones?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he replied. “The bank makes us do that. One is for business and the other for personal.”

“Why is that necessary?”

“I don’t really know,” he said, “some kind of compliance thing, I guess.”

Since he worked for the biggest bank in town, I assumed the two-phone requirement was not widespread. Wrong. I soon found that all my guys who worked for banks had two phones. And not just banks. Other large corporations had their employees carrying two phones to keep their business and personal communications—their lives—separate.

In the TV series SEVERANCE, employees of a large corporation consent to having a chip implanted in their brains that creates two selves who know nothing of each other. When they enter the building for work in the morning the chip erases their personal self, and when they leave at night it erases their work self. Through the magic of a technology that I hope never exists, they become two separate people. It is two phones on steroids.

As creepy as SEVERANCE is, one can understand the corporate motivation. Bringing one’s personal life (and issues) into the office is an inefficient distraction that the employer would rather not have. I also understand the personal motivation. It would be nice not to bring your work home with you at night, as the Cultural Catechism advises. Spoiler alert: in practice, it is not nice at all. It turns out that the disintegration between the severed work and personal selves creates a unreconcilable schism in the soul of the severed employees—they begin to hate each other, even though they are one person.

Less dramatically, requiring employers to carry two phones leads to the same schism by encouraging a man to self-sever his work and personal self. In doing so, he becomes the direct opposite of what C.S. Lewis calls the “integrated man” who does not compartmentalize his faith from one area of his life to another. For Lewis, a fully integrated man is one governed by the same belief system regardless of his circumstances.

Disintegrated by his two phones, a man can become cast off in a sea of ambivalence, seeking the safe harbor of a work-life balance that he can never quite reach because he cannot sever his work and personal selves without causing them both to suffer.

Overly dramatic? Maybe. But the Bible tells us that Peter “wept bitterly” after he disowned Jesus a mere three times. Over the course of his work life, how many times will the disintegrated man with two phones in his pocket be forced to do the same thing?

And how then shall he weep?