Images: Unsplash

Forgive me for being a wet blanket, but one of the most tedious things about being a working adult in Singapore is our uniquely Singaporean office lunch culture. For lack of a better description, Singaporean office lunch culture appears to be ridden with the sort of peer pressure that turns supposedly rational adults into teenagers.

As the hour of socialising descends upon the office anytime from 12 to 2 PM, the designated leader of the Office Lunch Clique poses the seemingly innocent question: “Lunch?”.

For the uninitiated, this is mere formality. The question is really an unspoken rule that we should leave the office for lunch with the team. It also assumes that we should want to hang out with our colleagues in a social setting, and that we are ‘anti-social’ if we choose to remain at our desks or have lunch alone.

Rejection of lunch invites is done at the individual’s own risk. The bold decision to consistently avoid eating with our colleagues or to have a solo lunch at our desks may be mocked by more ‘sociable’ colleagues through tired retorts, like “bo jio”. If this happens often enough, we’re as good as social pariahs, thereby excommunicated from the Office Lunch Clique.

As the rules of Singaporean office lunch culture dictate, the only thing worse than turning down a lunch invite is not receiving one in the first place.

Following this rhetorical enquiry, a mass exodus of Office Lunch Cliques from offices streams into the surrounding malls, food courts, and hawker centres, ready to ‘chope’ their seats with lanyards, tissue packets, and name cards.

Regardless of which Office Lunch Clique we belong to, lunch itself is usually one hour’s worth of self-indulgent, unproductive drivel packaged as necessary employee bonding. While ‘lighter’ lunch topics can range from discussing weekend plans to talking about marriage/children/BTOs, many of us see lunch as an opportunity to air grievances about work.

For that reason, lunch hour can be spent dredging up shared dissatisfaction, feeding each other’s unhappiness, and ‘bonding’ over gossip. The result: a false sense of intimacy.

Essentially, the average Singaporean worker quickly learns to embrace Singaporean office lunch culture as a way of life. It’s a singular experience designed to make us feel accepted and excluded at once.