You order delivery without checking what you ordered last time. The app remembers your address better than you remember deciding you were hungry.
Something about sitting alone makes the space feel louder. So you fill it. Not with people. Not with phone calls. With food that arrives in packaging you'll hide at the bottom of the trash.
Maybe you've noticed you don't actually taste most of it.
This isn't about being hungry. It never was.
When Your Body Mistakes One Need for Another
Here's something most people don't realize: loneliness and hunger activate the same regions in your brain. When researchers compared brain scans of people who were socially isolated to those who hadn't eaten, they found something startling-both loneliness and hunger share signals deep in the part of the brain that governs basic impulses for reward and motivation.