A column urges readers to savor the ordinary; in 2023, 26% of Americans ate every meal alone

Psychology professor Lizabeth Roemer and photographer Josh Bartok told readers of Psychology Today on October 22, 2026 that favorite meals get eaten on autopilot, and that taking away the phones can raise the reward a meal gives. A University of Oxford paper published on April 22, 2026 counts the other problem: 26% of American adults had eaten every meal alone the day before they were surveyed in 2023.

A column that begins with a robin

Roemer teaches psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Bartok is a contemplative photographer and life coach. They open with a post by the author and cartoonist Sophie Lucido Johnson, who reminded her Instagram followers that robins and house sparrows are extraordinary if you pay attention, and warned against dismissing them with the phrase “It’s just a…”.

Their argument is about attention. The mind recognizes familiar things quickly, which saves effort for tasks that need it, and the same shortcut makes us skip the smells, tastes and small kindnesses of an ordinary day, a stranger's kindness on the commute among them. The authors give three examples of what gets dismissed: “It’s just a thank you note”, “It’s just allowing a car to merge” and “It’s just taking out the trash”. Dismissing them, the authors write, means missing moments of generosity or care, particularly when attention is so easily drawn to acts of cruelty and harm.

The remedy has a name, beginner's mind, and a price of zero, which sets it apart from most things sold as mindfulness.

It comes as four short practices: five to ten minutes of curiosity in the morning, a fresh look at the journey to work or the shops, savoring familiar activities, and noticing the kind messages that arrive in the flood of emails and texts.

The third practice is the one that belongs at a table. The column puts it in one sentence.

“Family movie nights can devolve into everyone distracted by their phones; favorite meals can be eaten mindlessly; and conversations can be interrupted by countless distractions.”

The authors add that you can also notice the routine work of the people near you, such as whoever cleared the table or made the meal, and consider whether some thanks are due.

One citation behind the advice

The sentence about removing distractions carries a single citation: a 2012 paper by K. M. Livingstone and S. Srivastava in the Journal of Research in Personality, titled “Up-regulating positive emotions in everyday life: Strategies, individual differences, and associations with positive emotion and well-being”. We could not open that paper, so we cannot say how many people it studied or whether it tested phone-free dinners.

Its title speaks of strategies and associations. The column gives neither a sample nor a design, and it frames itself as an invitation: “Try these brief, simple practices and notice whether they enhance your life.” That is honest advice for a Thursday morning. It is not a trial result, and the column does not claim to be one.

A second Psychology Today column, by Shahram Heshmat, makes a related case for slowness. It says slowing down and pacing an experience lets the brain savor positive moments, and it quotes Oscar Wilde's line that there are two tragedies in life: not getting what you want and getting what you want. Heshmat's point is that a pleasure which starts out very enjoyable fades within minutes, as we get used to it. His column offers no study for that claim.

Counting shared meals in 142 countries

The Oxford paper, titled "Sharing meals is associated with greater wellbeing" and published in Scientific Reports, supplies the numbers the columns lack. Its first study uses a special module of the Gallup World Poll, fielded in 2022 and 2023 in 142 countries and territories. More than 150,000 people were asked on how many of the last seven days they had eaten lunch, and dinner, with someone they knew.

The authors find a significant positive relationship between the number of shared meals and wellbeing in almost every world region. By their measure, the number of shared meals explains as much of the variation in wellbeing as some key socioeconomic indicators, income and unemployment among them.

The geography is uneven. Latin Americans share about nine meals a week on average, and the lowest levels sit in South and East Asia. Income does not account for much of that gap: its correlation with meal sharing at country level is 0.2 and explains 4.6% of the variation, which leaves 95.4% to explain, in the authors' words an opportunity for future research.

Two details belong next to those figures.

The module was sponsored by the Japanese corporation Ajinomoto, a funding the authors acknowledge, and they declare no competing interests. And the authors state plainly that they cannot say which way the arrow points: whether sharing meals makes people happier, whether happy people share more meals, or both.

Alone at the table in the United States

The paper's second study turns to the American Time Use Survey, which covers 234,185 respondents between 2003 and 2023. In 2023, roughly one in four adults, 26%, reported eating all of their meals alone the day before. That is an increase of more than 50% since 2003, and the rate was higher than during the pandemic years.

The rise is steepest among the young. The share of 18 to 24-year-olds who ate every meal alone grew by about 90% in two decades, and the authors find a similarly sharp increase among 25 to 34-year-olds. They observe that people who live alone are considerably more likely to eat alone, and that remote work was rising before 2020. They also say that the usual explanations, smartphones and the pandemic among them, do not line up neatly with the timeline.

On wellbeing, the American data come from four survey years that carried a wellbeing module: 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2021. Adults who ate all their meals alone rated their lives about 0.5 points lower on average than those who shared meals. Those who ate at least one meal with others reported more happiness and less sadness and pain, with a slightly lower level of stress. Tiredness did not differ significantly.

Sunday Guardian Live told couples that they waste their weekends, a claim examined in an earlier brief. The meal paper does not study couples. It counts who sits at the table, not how well they get along.

What savoring looks like when it is measured

The nearest study we could read on savoring in daily life is smaller and older. In a paper published in PLOS One on May 11, 2021, Colombo and colleagues asked 85 undergraduate students to answer a short smartphone questionnaire three times a day for two weeks, giving up to 42 observations each. At every prompt the students rated seven positive emotions, among them hope, serenity, gratitude and amusement, and how much they were using six strategies to enhance them.

The finding runs against the intuition that savoring is what happy people do. The less a student felt positive emotion at one moment, the more that student tended to use positive strategies by the next, and the use of those strategies was followed by higher positive emotion. The authors call this a mechanism that compensates for a lack of positive emotion.

They list their own limits. The sample was 85 healthy undergraduates, and six people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms were excluded, so the pattern may not hold for patients, who are typically prone to dampening positive emotion rather than savoring it. The result also diverges from earlier studies in which high positive emotion led to more strategy use.

The study recorded strategies students reported using. It did not train anyone in beginner's mind and did not test a five-minute morning practice, which is what Roemer and Bartok suggest.

What the table can and cannot show

The Oxford authors list what they did not explore: the quality of the social interactions at a shared meal, the type of meal, and confounders such as work schedules. They add that Gallup's data cannot properly account for respondents who skipped a lunch or a dinner, which may matter where food is scarce.

For a reader in the United States, the practical reading is modest. The columns offer attention as a free habit, and the paper offers a large association between having company at meals and reporting a better life. Neither shows that a phone-free dinner raises anyone's wellbeing, and neither claims to.

The column ends by inviting readers to turn their “It’s just a…” reactions into a moment of noticing and savoring.

Sources

• Savoring the Ordinary, Psychology Today, Lizabeth Roemer and Josh Bartok, October 22, 2026
• Sharing meals is associated with greater wellbeing, Scientific Reports, University of Oxford, April 22, 2026
• Savoring the present: The reciprocal influence between positive emotions and positive emotion regulation in everyday life, PLOS One, Colombo et al., May 11, 2021