How I spend my lunch break

At my previous job, there were days I took my full lunch break and days I didn’t. I tried to always at least leave my desk, even if I only went as far as the canteen downstairs. I sat and tapped through Instagram stories. Sometimes I did the New York Times crossword, or read a chapter of a book. If I saw Slack notifications coming through to my phone I would go back upstairs.

I felt lucky to be able to do this, because there were people in this workplace that were expressly told not to take their full lunch break. To be gone from the office for a full hour was considered selfish, at least according to one editor. If there was a big breaking news moment, that was especially true. Sometimes this was communicated in passive aggression, murmers of complaints and questions of ‘where the fuck are they?’. Other times it was declared openly. Now is not the time to be taking your full lunch break. I was on the lifestyle desk, where breaking news wasn’t really a thing, but in these periods I still stayed at my desk in a mix of some sort of vague solidarity and the awkwardness of a silently busy newsroom where if you scrambled up and put on your coat, everyone would notice.

In the job before that one, I took the full hour. I used to work right by leather lane market, so I dithered through the stalls before settling on the bargain salad box, piled high with pink pickles, or the crustless quiche, a hot block of cheese on top of wilted veg.

In both jobs, I either had lunch alone or spent it talking to the person I was dating. In my first proper job, I was in a relationship with someone who was attending law school in Washington DC, so I called him during lunch if he had woken up early before his classes. We broke up and I started an amorphous thing with someone at work. We went for lunches together until I left that role and moved on to another. At the second job, lunches were had solo until I started dating someone at this job, the partner who I now share a house with, and then we would have rushed meals in the canteen or at his desk, because while I could get away with a full hour in theory he almost certainly could not.

My lunch breaks have always been simply for having lunch, with a little bit of non-work thought or relationship stuff if there’s time. I’ve met people who use their lunch breaks to exercise, or to write fiction, and I’ve always been envious of their ability to do this. I tend to think good for them, but not for me. The mental exertion required to swap from one thing to another is too much and takes too long. If I try to swap out of main job mode to side project mode, it takes me a good half an hour to do so, and once I’ve done the essential bit of actually eating food, it hardly seems worth pushing through just to have to finish up just as I’m getting going. I would much rather enjoy the respite of being mindless for a few minutes; eating some noodles, taking in updates from other people’s lives rather than creating anything of my own.

I’m musing on lunch breaks today after watching a TikTok of a woman ranting about her colleagues wanting to grab lunch with her, day after day, and reading an excellent piece in Vice off the back of it. “I wanna be on IG scrolling,” she says. I saw a screenshot of a different article, from the Times, on Twitter, which gave evidence for Gen Z being “a bunch of workplace slackers” via a description of some under-25s who “take a full one-hour break” rather than “chowing down a salad over their keyboards”.

The reaction to these young people who want to protect their one hour lunch break as solely their own has been, widely, admonishment from older generations and appreciation from agemates. Reposts of the TikTok video have comments declaring the woman’s rant is “relatable” and that people “feel the pain”… but also calls for her to be fired, labels of '“unprofessional”, “jarring”, “an ick” (she’s a young Black woman, so the intensity of the hate from strangers is, miserably, not much of a surprise).

There’s a real sense that if you’re not using your lunch breaks to either work or to socialise with the people you work with (which often is work in itself), you must not be fully committed to your job, or that you don’t like it. This is strange and nonsensical when you think about it. We take breaks from everything, because doing anything, even something you enjoy, for hours straight is exhausting.

“If you treat your work time like work and do this you might have a short term feeling of ownership and work life balance,” says an account with a blue tick. “But if you treat work time as an investment in what you believe and what you want to achieve in the world you’ll act differently, be happier, successful.”

But you can view your work has important and meaningful and enjoyable, and still need a chunk of time in the middle of the day to reset. You can like your colleagues, and still want a few minutes where your mind isn’t whirring into conversation, where you don’t have to be interesting or entertaining. These are human needs, like sleep, like eating. Feeling a hunger for this time reveals nothing about you besides you being a human.

This conversation is not new, these ideas are not novel. A few years back, Stylist ran a great campaign called Reclaim Your Lunch Break, which encouraged women to stop eating at their desk and take their full hour out of the office. Maybe we need to bring this back, but with an emphasis that you don’t always have to reclaim your lunch break for the purpose of socialising, or some sort of fun hobby, but that it can be yours simply to be a moment of rest. That it’s your right to move from the desk to your sofa and lie under a blanket for forty minutes, or to stay where you are but switch your clicking from an excel sheet to Insagram.

Your lunch break is your. lunch. break. A time to eat. A time to take a break from whatever you need a break from, including the effort required to be social. A time that is yours to use however you like.

These days I’m only in the office twice a week. On these days, sometimes I’ll head out with the brilliant people I work with and wander back up to leather lane market. The quiche stall is no longer there, and the salad bar has been replaced with multiple falafel stands that serve up smaller salad boxes at higher prices. I get a pad thai, or a ‘protein box’ that is essentially just a burrito without the tortilla. I ask for extra cheese. Other times, I heat up the other half of yesterday’s dinner in the microwave that doesn’t rotate your food but makes it so hot it burns your mouth. I check my non-work email and catch up on what’s going on in the world. The other day, I walked to the post office to drop off a return and stopped in a tea shop on the way back, spending £40 on a paper bag full of chamomile and earl grey.

When I’m working from home, lunch is split into two: half an hour to eat, half an hour to do a whip round the house and tidy up messes. I eat my lunch in front of the TV. I think I should be writing right now. I inevitably return to my laptop before the hour is up but allow my ‘grabbing lunch, brb’ Slack status to run until its set expiry because the assumption that I’m away, and the quietening of messages and the pressure to respond, is enjoyable. I think I am so lucky to have this job, and to have a job that lets me work from home three days a week. I think that woman is so right, and if I was back in the office full-time and people expected me to get lunch with them every single day I would lose my mind. I think the people I work with are great, but everyone needs a break and then I wonder why the ‘but’ is necessary, that an ‘and’ would function just as well and perhaps be more correct. I reframe. I love my job, I love the people I work with, and I also need a break.

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