Eating alone is fine. Not being asked about your day is different.

I cook in a small place with eight seats. Most evenings at least half of them are people eating on their own, and I have watched enough of it now to be certain of one thing: eating alone and being lonely are unrelated. Some of the most contented people I serve come in by themselves every Thursday and would be irritated by company.

What I notice instead is something narrower and easier to miss. It is not the absence of people. It is the absence of anyone who knows what happened to you today.

Solitude is chosen. Being unwitnessed is not.

You can have a full week — colleagues, a crowded train, messages all day — and still finish it without anyone asking a question they actually wanted the answer to. Nothing is wrong on paper. There is nobody to tell about the small thing that happened at four in the afternoon, and after a while you stop noticing the small things, because a thing nobody hears about starts to feel like a thing that did not happen.

The small question

In the restaurant I ask people what they ate yesterday. It is a deliberately unimportant question and it works better than asking how they are. How-are-you has one correct answer and everyone knows it. What did you eat yesterday has no script, so people answer honestly, and about a third of the time the answer contains something else they wanted to say.

If you want to be a better friend to someone this month, that is the whole method. Ask something too small to lie about.

And if it is you

The instinct is usually to wait for it to resolve on its own, or to decide you need a bigger change than you do — a new city, a new job. Often what is needed is much smaller and much more boring: twenty minutes a week where somebody asks about Thursday and listens to the answer.

That is roughly what I do here, and it is what I do on this site at weekends. Not therapy. Conversation, which is an older and less ambitious thing, and which for most ordinary weeks is the correct size of remedy.