Ending The Sad Desk Lunch

For most of my working life in the U.S., lunch was wilted leftovers eaten over a keyboard, one eye on Slack, the other on whatever I was pretending to finish. Maybe a bag of chips or whatever free snack I could wrangle from a breakroom. I can’t say I was enjoying the food, just trying to get through my tasks with the least possible interruption to the grind so I could leave at 5 pm guilt-free.

When we moved to working from home, I assumed things would change. More freedom, more flexibility, surely more space for a real midday break. Instead, the habit just mutated. The desk was different, but the lunch was still sad. 

Then we moved abroad, and Europe had thoughts about all of this.

Here, the idea of skipping lunch, or spending it at your desk, alone, lands somewhere between eccentric and offensive. Lunch is a punctuation mark in the day. People go out, sit, talk, and don't apologize for taking two hours to do it. Morning coffee is the same. It’s not taken to go. It's a reason to go somewhere. An espresso at the bar with a pastry is simply commuting time.

The first few weeks, I'll be honest, my American brain was twitching. This is too long. I should be working. Someone is probably emailing me right now. The rhythm felt almost irresponsible. An indulgence. But that anxiety, I came to realize, was the habit talking, not any actual evidence that the world was falling apart while I sat in the sun with a beer at 1 pm on a weekday.

We found our café pretty early after arriving. A neighborhood spot, nothing fancy, the kind of place with a chalkboard menu and owners who greet you like they've been waiting for you specifically. We started going once a week. Then maybe twice. And rather quickly, we became regulars.

I had never been a regular anywhere before. Not really. I'd had coffee shops and bars I liked, but never anywhere I felt different than anyone else off the street. But here, at our Portugese pastelaria, the owners know our order. We know their kids' names. We've been introduced to their friends, who have become our friends. We show up on a Sunday morning and run into someone we know without planning it. It sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing.

When you move abroad, or honestly, when you make any major life pivot, loneliness shows up in ways you don't always anticipate. Not dramatic, consuming loneliness necessarily, but the absence of your people and places, and the shorthand of a life you built over decades. You don't realize how much of your social fabric was woven into the incidental moments, such as the neighbor who always waved, until those moments are just gone. The café gave some of that back to us. Not because we went looking for community, but because we just kept showing up.

The truth about habits, even the ones that aren't serving you, is that they're incredibly difficult to ditch voluntarily. The sad desk lunch wasn't making me happier or more productive. I knew that, on some level, for years. But I kept doing it because it was familiar, because it was frictionless, and because changing it would have required a kind of deliberate effort that daily life rarely leaves room for.

Sometimes it takes a move. Sometimes it takes a new country and a culture that looks at your old routine like you've lost your mind. Sometimes the friction has to come from the outside, because we simply won't create it ourselves.

What we've found, over and over again in this life we're building, is that the things we were forced to leave behind have quietly revealed themselves as the things we didn't actually need. And the things we were nudged toward have become the ones we can't imagine living without.

Leave the desk. Go get a coffee. Let it take a little longer than feels comfortable.

It's not wasted time. It turns out, it might be some of the best time you've got.

Until next time,

Benn (+ Melissa)

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