Before I lost my tongue to cancer, having friends over for dinner was my most common form of hanging out:

No sane person wants their tongue removed, but having it out and not being able to swallow has particularly awful resonances for me: I’ve been into food and cooking since I was a teenager, and “going out to dinner” was the most common form of going out for Bess and me. “Having friends over for dinner” was our most common form of socializing. I chronically experimented with new food and gadgets in the kitchen. What can I make with fish sauce? Is the sous vide machine worth it? Can an air fryer replace the oven for many dishes? Will the capers in cauliflower piccata alienate our guests?

After the surgery, the questions changed. Would I meaningfully survive at all? In that first week after the surgery, I felt I should be dead. What would happen to me? Would any semblance of normal life be achievable?

I like to eat—or, rather, liked to eat—and, at current levels of technology, everyone needs food. So why not combine what I like to do, what everyone needs to do, and what I can afford to do? “Come over for dinner” is low stakes: eat for an hour and discuss the projects we’re working on, the things we’ve learned lately, or the ideas we’ve been having. Then go somewhere else, or do something else, or finish the work.

Most people experience diminishing marginal returns from hanging out: the first hour might be great, the second okay, and the third drags. How many times have you wanted to leave some event that was good for a while but ceased being so, yet you felt socially obligated to? For this reason, a time constraint, true or not, improves a lot of meetings: “Let’s go for that walk at 3:00, but I have to run by 4:00.” A lot of us aren’t that interesting, or don’t vibe as well with one another as we could or should, or aren’t working on projects that are fun to share.

Things are past the optimal point when phones come out and videos or whatever start being passed back and forth. For some reason, a lot of people want to fill the time they have with hanging out, but my ideal is different: we should hang out for the right amount of time—which is, I think, usually the length of a long meal—and that’s typically not all day, even if theoretically all day is available. Because the ice cream is there doesn’t mean all of it should be eaten; because the day is there doesn’t mean the whole thing should be spent.[1]

That a lot of us aren’t maximally interesting is a weakness mostly ignored in David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, as I describe in “The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know.” Yet Brooks says some people are better at eliciting the best in others, and that we can consciously improve our ability to elicit the best. I want to think I am one of those people, and that the act of feeding people interesting things helps to bring out the best in them, but, if I’m being honest or realistic, I’m likely not.