The Introvert’s Struggle: Eating Lunch With Coworkers
By: Franco Amati
Tags: Work, Self, Introvert, Psychology, Lunch

The Introvert’s Struggle: Eating Lunch With Coworkers

No, I don’t want to talk about food while eating food

Photo by bantersnapson Unsplash

I have no doubt that I can go days, weeks, months without uttering a single word to another human and be better for it. Sound extreme? Then you’re probably an extravert. You might want to stop reading here.

I love eating meals alone too. Maybe that’s why I respect my cats so much. I envy their quiet, solitary lives. The most admirable creatures are the ones that have no need to prove their strength or ferocity to anyone but themselves.

So many people are showoffs, braggarts, constantly trying to prove they’re the best. In an environment where everyone tries to portray their optimal self, it’s no wonder all people want to do is talk all the time.

The worst time to be around people is at work when they’re eating lunch. When I worked in an office, this was by far the most challenging part of the day to get through because I felt really pressured to socialize. And it was hard to disguise the anxiety I was feeling.

I didn’t want to seem tired or exhausted (which everyone was, but still). I didn’t want to show my coworkers that I wasn’t really interested in what they were like outside of work.

Now, I’m sure some people have already tuned-out at this point. This guy’s anti-social. I’m not going to bother with this. He’s over-generalizing. Sure, a lot of workplaces are really great, and there’s nothing wrong with loving your coworkers. I completely agree with that. I wish I had that kind of camaraderie with this particular group of people. But I just didn’t.

They were all pretentious. And they ate pretentious foods, like organic stuff with quinoa and all kinds of grains that I had never heard of. They ate oats and skyr for breakfast. Come on, can we get some cereal and milk in here once and a while? What’s with all the muesli? And no, I don’t want to add chia and flax seeds.

And the conversations… oh the conversations. The only three topics these coworkers ever talked about at the table were the following:

where they’ve traveled

what shows they were binge watching

and… food!

Right — food. They loved to talk about food while they ate food. This was by far the most common conversation topic. I remember thinking, wow, I bet zombies have better conversations while they’re eating corpses.

I mean—I get it—it’s sort of natural to be like, oh this sandwich is great. That’s fine. But when the primary content of discourse is food while you’re stuffing your face with it — it’s just too much.

It’s like, listen, I’m just eating my food here, and it’s decent — I don’t need to talk about the nuances and the nutrition and the preparation and the subtle combinations of flavors. I’m putting it all in my mouth right now — I can taste all the combinations. I’m chewing and digesting, and in a minute I’ll be worrying about whether or not it’s gonna come back out of me before I have to start working again. I don’t need all this. Can we talk about something else please?

No. They take it even further. It goes from what they’re eating to all the cool things they’ve ever eaten in the history of their lives. All the fantastic dishes consumed on vacations to exotic countries. Or even more lame, all the fancy meal prep and planning they do on Sundays (again, while they’re binge watching their favorite TV shows).

It’s the introvert struggle—we’re forced to talk to uninteresting and unoriginal people all the time. And the sad thing is that I understand the reason they’re so boring and unoriginal. It’s because everyone’s so overly consumed by their careers. The only real things ordinary people have to talk about are the little scraps of non-work related activities they manage to squeeze into their schedule when they’re not inundated by responsibilities.

I mean, I guess if you really think about it, a substantial portion of the time most people spend on non-work related tasks has a lot to do with bodily functions, like eating. And we can’t really talk about pooping or farting or having sex, so eating is the natural go-to. And when they get their two weeks of PTO, and they actually get to live life for a little while — in impressive fashion mind you, because they all work in tech — it’s natural that they want to brag about it.

As sad as food dialogue can be, it might be that binge-television is an even sadder topic. It’s the only thing left at the end of the day, right? When your brain is total mush — it’s all your body is capable of doing in those two hours between dinner and sleep. Put on that Netflix or Hulu or Prime, or whatever overpriced streaming service you like, and have at it.

Photo by Nik Shuliahinon Unsplash

We all watch the same stuff too, because the algorithms in our devices are all tuned into the same data, and we’re all being recommended the same poorly written garbage, and then we’re telling our coworkers to watch it.

Why not reads books or do some art or write poetry? Well, most of that stuff takes too much time, thought, and imagination. Who has energy for that?

So I’m out of luck, really. My coworkers probably think there’s something wrong with me. That I’m awkward or that I don’t know how to socialize. They see that I never really have much to say, so there must be something wrong with me. I’m sure they notice that I’m so quiet. To them, I’m the weirdo for not constantly filling the atmosphere with my voice in between bites of kale.

And then there’s after work—don’t even get me started on the pressure to socialize off the clock. I’m certain they all wonder why I have no desire to join them for happy hour—why I don’t want to gather around at the loudest bar in town and get plastered. But they gotta do it, right? They have to drown out the sound of the nothingness in their own heads. Why don’t I want to hear you sing karaoke? Because I already hear you sing music that isn’t yours all day long. I don’t need to hear more of it.

Workplace lunch tables all across the universe are like this. So what’s an extreme introvert to do?

I remember I would try to escape.

Since all these people lived by the clock, I would employ strategic timing to get away from them. If I didn’t have a meeting between 11:30 and 12:00, I would get up and go to lunch by myself. This way I would beat all the pre-lunch social roaming that took place.

When all the morning meetings ended, they’d float around like hungry, deflating balloons, meandering from cubicle to cubicle, asking to see who was available for lunch. And by then, I would already be gone, somewhere, anywhere that didn’t require me to be in earshot of more insipid conversation.

It was hard, though, to find a peaceful place to eat lunch in a busy city. Sometimes it was impossible to locate an area with any kind of seating at all, let alone somewhere that wasn’t insanely crowded and required you to wait about a third of your lunch break in line just to get the food.

It was a nightmare. Big, bustling cities are not a place for introverts who want to use their lunch break as a quiet time to clear their heads.

No respite from the chaos. No haven to recapture a bit of your sanity. No luck in a metropolis so mad and all-consuming. No wonder that janitor who cleaned the office would eat lunch by himself in the maintenance elevator. He knew what was up.

Small talk. Pointless conversations. It’s all noise on top of noise on top of noise. I can’t stand being part of conversations that don’t go anywhere and don’t mean anything. If I’m not learning something profoundly interesting about you or sharing something incredibly interesting about me, then I want out. All I can hope is that there’s at least one other person out there who understands.