Weird Things 90s Employees Did
They took lunch, they read books
Some worker somewhere in the world recently recommended on Instagram that workplaces institute 30-minute silent reading periods after lunch. I love the idea.
But two interrelated problems keep us from this smart policy: people don’t take lunch, and they don’t read books.
Nearly half of American workers skip lunch at least once a week, and a surprising lot of workers improvise lunches out of workplace snacks, according to the The Lunch Report. Lots of peeps concede lunch breaks are life-giving, but “today’s workers are 40% more likely to say they never stop for a midday meal than they were a year ago.”
Gallup data suggests that, in the late 90s, Americans read as many as 18.5 books a year. Today, that number is down to 12.6.
I’m thinking about feeding and reading, because last week I attended the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin University. They had box lunches and lots and lots of books.
Here are a few work culture benefits the Fest taught me about reading and lunching.
Books bust the loneliness we feel at work. So do lunches.
Our jobs are increasingly specialized. They’re often remote. Sometimes, according to the anthropologist David Graeber, they’re simply bullshit. So, even though you won’t find so many work cubicles as you did in the 90s, our work is increasingly partitioned. Busting these partitions will require a mindset shift from indifference to empathy.
Some of our indifference to each other is rooted in social and cultural prejudices. In this vein, the historian Jemar Tisby, speaking at the Festival, said something to this effect: “You white people have gotten really, really good at building walls around yourselves. It’s time you got good at building bridges.”
My recommendation for bridge-building is paradoxical: take lunch, read books.
It’s paradoxical because reading itself is isolating practice. But try thinking about the practice this way: reading photosynthesizes empathy. As you spend time with authors, listen to voices, and hang out with ideas very different from your own, you send compassion coursing through your veins.
Lunch-reading sends you back to the job quicker to give others empathy.
Books and lunches help us cope with work’s pointlessness
The world often conspires to make work feel irrelevant. A couple of weeks ago, a few colleagues and I spent a morning preparing a panel presentation. But when we arrived at the venue, the room was empty. And it stayed that way till we finally walked out.
You too have suffered apparently meaningless work. You send off a newsletter to your clients, and the open rates are in the teens. You call a meeting with your team, and they keep their cameras off. You spend hours filing receipts on Workday, only to discover that you forgot to click “itemize” or whatever, and you have to do it all over again. How do you cope with the vanity of toil?
At the Festival, my friend Jane Zwart interviewed the novelist Yaa Gyasi about her books Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom. At one point, Jane asked the Ghanainan-American author, “What do we do with our smallness?” Jane was referring, in part, to the seeming irrelevance of our lives in an impersonal cosmos. Gyasi’s novels address this problem by depicting what she calls “quieter opportunities to exist.”
Half an hour of silent reading after lunch sounds like a quieter opportunity to exist.
But whether you’re reading Gyasi’s fiction or just sipping African Yam & Peanut Soup (from her novel Homegoing), you’ll find healing for labor’s vanity. Reading makes the deeply personal feel shareable. So does soup.
Reading and lunching validate the tiny experience of needy creatures by connecting that experience to broadly felt conditions.
Books smack you with fresh realities. So do sandwiches, sort of.
Have you seen Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See? Better yet, have you read Anthony Doerr’s novel by the same title? He was, as it turned out, the Festival’s final speaker this past week. Having read a couple of his novels, I was expecting a sober and stately speech about finding courage to act in impossible circumstances.
But Doerr’s talk didn’t sound anything like the dignified picture I’ve included above. (Also, my photo doesn’t show his blue Chuck Taylors.)
In his constantly antic way, he argued that stories connect everything to everything else. Books use a lot of similes, right? That habit, he said, ambushes you with new parts of reality. (That’s how my feverish notes put it, anyway.)
Bringing this newsletter back to work culture, let me suggest that taking lunch and reading books are practices that alter your workplace attention.
The Mode/Switch Pod recently discussed how we pay attention on the job. We contrasted tunnel vision with what Ken Heffner calls uber vision. One listener responded that his employees distinguish head-down from heads-up attention. My hunch is that reading-while-lunching helps to cultivate both kinds of awareness. Reading requires tunnel vision: the practice obliges concentration. But taking a lunch break simultaneously enables the opposite. It fights back against the task myopia that work so often induces and instead throws open the windows of your brain.
How to Lunch and Read at Work
Don’t underestimate the difficulty of the mode/switch I’m recommending this week. You’ll note that I encountered this week’s wisdom on Instagram, which, more than anything else in my life, shortens reading time.
But at the same time, I don’t think this newsletter is mounting a pile of library books to bellow into a megaphone, “Lunch Readers of the World Unite!” Stuffing a library book into your backpack isn’t a revolutionary move. It’s as humble and nourishing as putting slices of pepper jack and roast beef on homemade bread.
Still, it won’t be easy. Here are some suggestions:
Read before work for 20 minutes a day. That modest practice will not only start your day off quietly and imaginatively, but it will make it easier to read a few pages during lunch as well.
Fast over lunch, and take a walk with an audio book. I have a physical therapist friend who walks hours everyday, listening to book after book. A well-narrated book makes it easier to focus. Try Audible or (if you’re cheap like me) Libby.
Invite your coworkers to vote on a lunch read each month. Your fifth-grade teacher was right. Reading—even silent reading—is best done in community.
Talk about books and food before virtual meetings. Especially if you’re a manager, use that awkward space before the meeting starts—or before Bryce finally arrives—to ask people what they’re reading and lunching on. Make sure to model the practice yourself! And if people shrug, ask them what they wish they’d lunched on, what they wish they were reading.
I usually conclude this newsletter with a signature. But this week I’m going to close with someone else’s. Near the end of the Festival, I stood in line to get tech writer and memoirist Meghan O’Gieblyn’s autograph. Her two-word byline summed the wisdom this newsletter’s been reaching for. Lunching-and-reading is one good way to—well, read it for yourself below.
Listen While You Read, er, Work
If you’re looking for ways to get started reading, try Anne Bogel’s podcast What Should I Read Next? And then, when you’re back from the public library, here’s some music to accompany your reading.
This isn’t exactly a Works Cited. But I’m happy to say that the inspiration for this week’s newsletter title came from this reel.
