Dinner Tables Will Save The Future

We forge the best camaraderie in the strangest places and at unexpected moments

I always found family meals boring. I still do. But I am fiercely determined to establish the tradition of eating together in my future family until the day I die. 

Still, I find eating at the table boring. Chewing food is a brainless chore that requires no animation save the mechanical movement of hands and jaws. Again, I find it excruciatingly boring. But I am unmoved in my decision to establish a tradition of the family meal by the time I get married and have children. Regardless of how boring I think eating at a dining table is, I believe that it will save the future from the wreck we are sliding towards. 

Dinner Table Scene in the 2012 movie The Campaign

I am scared for the future. I am not optimistic about it. That is why I wish to curtail the downward slide I believe is coming. Having seen how screens weaken the bonds of the modern family (my family escaped this that is why I return to it), I thought it necessary to preserve the future bond between my wife, my kids, and myself. In real-time, parents turn to the Internet to raise their kids and hope that schools will be surrogate parents. As such, the family unit is not what it used to be. If the television, according to Marshall McLuhan, made the family circle a semi-circle, our portable screens turn the family circle into splinters and broken crumbs of a pie. I will do this one thing to keep my family a circle.

But why the dinner table, you ask? Because I remember what it meant to me — as boring as it was. Let me clarify: I hate eating at the table because I hate eating. I hate to chew and swallow. But my experience with my siblings and parents — especially my siblings — at the table was a delightful one. The race to finish first; the threat to devour the loser’s meat; my pleading with my brothers and sisters to relieve my suffering and eat my food are all memories I do not wish to lose; not even to the promise of the most luscious screens. It is a memory worth preserving. It is a memory worth replicating.

You see, we forge the best camaraderie in the strangest places and at unexpected moments. I want my kids to have that with me and their siblings. I want them to find each other’s presence stable, warm, and inviting so that they will find digital abundance to be meaningless. We do not always see what is happening when we are establishing a tradition such as eating together. It looks boring until its benefits appear.

As such, when the pleasures of the world and the vacuous monsters of the Internet threaten my future children with a coldness I cannot explain, I want them to know that there is a place where they can experience the real world. A wooden table. Where we sit together as a full circle with the love of one another as a focus. Where we do what real people, not virtual entities, do. Where we laugh and loosen up; tussle and toughen up; love and happily lose ourselves. Where we confess and comfort. Where everyone helps everyone. This, I believe, is how you save the world.

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