"Eating alone looks sad"

There's one room that deserves its own chapter, which is the one you're in on your own. The café table for one, the cinema seat for one, the restaurant, the gig, the walk round the gallery. Here the audience has a specific verdict ready. On your own means nobody to be with. And so the thing you'd like to do, you don't, or you do it with a phone held up as a reason.

Rebecca Ratner and Rebecca Hamilton published a paper in 2015 called Inhibited from bowling alone, on exactly this. They found that people hold back from enjoyable public activities alone, cinema, restaurants, because they expect other people to draw conclusions about how socially connected they are. And they found something I think is more useful than that. People overestimated how much their own enjoyment of the activity would depend on having someone with them. When the activity was made to look more purposeful, or when the expected number of observers was reduced, interest in doing it alone went up. The block wasn't the activity. It was the imagined room.

Their participants were being asked about consumer choices, and I'm carrying the result across to your café, which is an extension. But it lines up with everything so far. The verdict you expect, which is chapter 6, is harsher than the one people reach. The headcount, which is chapter 3, is higher than the real one. And the imagined enjoyment gap, that it won't be as nice alone, is the piece that's yours to test, because you can simply go and see.

Here's an invented example. Dan eats at the Italian place near his flat on his own on a Thursday because his flatmate's away, and sits with a book, and spends the first ten minutes with the beam on, sure the waiter has clocked him as someone with nobody. By the main course he's stopped noticing, because the book's good and the food's good. When he thinks about it afterwards, the only person in the restaurant he can describe is the waiter. He can't tell you who was at the other tables, and he's not sure anyone was looking at him, and he'd go again. The point of the example is the last part. Chapter 21 has it as a method.