Lunch alone is twenty minutes with the one person you’ll spend your whole life with. Make it decent company.

Yours is the one relationship with no exit, which makes the quality of your own company a practical matter. Twenty minutes alone can be pleasant, or it can be twenty minutes of commentary on your faults, and the difference is largely habit. Being decent company to yourself is a skill, and lunch is an easy place to practise it.

Try one this week without filling it: no scrolling, something you actually like to eat, your attention on the food or the window. If the commentary starts, answer it the way you would answer a friend being hard on themselves. Decent company, nothing more ambitious than that.