In 1950, sociologist David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd posited that a strong sense of conformity in America was replacing genuine human connection with a performance of group belonging. Avid consumers of mass culture, we had become primarily motivated by a desire to fit in. By blending into the crowd, he argued, we were all hiding from each other in plain sight.
Fifty years later, that seemed like a quaint problem to have. From churches to clubs to labor unions, as political scientist Robert Putnam argued in his landmark 2000 book, Bowling Alone, our civic infrastructure had disintegrated. The once-conformist crowds had dispersed, leaving behind a social void. Hunger for peer approval may have been misguided, but having no peers was far worse.
Another quarter-century on, atomization has only intensified. American life is suffering a profound social contraction, largely driven by new technologies that facilitate isolation. In the post-pandemic years, more Americans are working alone, worshipping alone, scrolling alone, exercising alone, and orgasming alone. And we’re increasingly eating alone too.
Today roughly one in four American adults eats all their daily meals in solitude, a more than 50 percent rise since 2003. For young adults under twenty-five, the increase is even more dramatic, with an 80 percent jump in solo dining over the past two decades. Living on an urban street with a rare surplus of street parking, I have a front-row seat to this dreary spectacle. Come lunch time, diners fresh from the nearby 7-Eleven or McDonald’s descend on my block to eat in their cars, patrons of the world’s loneliest cafeteria.
If bowling alone marks the decline of American mid-century organized social life, exclusively eating alone hints at something more foreboding. Consuming food all by oneself is an anomaly in the history of human civilization, a deviation from millennia of tradition. Shared meals stretch so far back that the earliest texts of ancient Sumerian…
Auteur: Meagan Day
