Eating Alone, Together

My grandmother had a rule about dinner I now recognize as roughly seventeen ethics violations under modern teenage law: no phones, no books, no television, and if you stood up before everyone finished, you committed a small war crime against the concept of family. We complained. We squirmed. We ate the green beans. And somewhere between the casserole and the dishwashing, we accidentally became people who knew each other.I’ve been thinking about this because I recently ate dinner alone in my apartment while watching a stranger on TikTok eat dinner alone in hers, and somewhere in this perfectly engineered loop of parasocial chewing, I started laughing, and not at anything funny. I’d realized humans (the species that once invented the civic idea of having lunch together) had outsourced breaking bread to a 23-year-old in Phoenix named Brittany reviewing a frozen burrito.This is, statistically, where most essays about technology and loneliness pivot into a doomscroll all their own. I’d…