"But, you know, they don't enjoy the dinner hour together. It's just not as much of a ritual at night and it's interesting. I think the ritual is taking place perhaps more in the morning"
About this Quote
Couric is doing that very journalist thing: using a small domestic detail to diagnose a big cultural shift without sounding alarmist. She’s not really talking about dinner. She’s talking about the collapse of a once-reliable ritual that used to organize family life, attention, and conversation - and she’s careful to frame it as observation, not moral judgment. The repeated hedges (“you know,” “perhaps,” “it’s interesting”) soften the claim while letting it land: something foundational has moved.
The subtext is a quiet inventory of modern pressures. Even without naming smartphones, late work hours, kids’ schedules, or the gig economy, you can feel them in the negative space. Dinner used to be the nightly checkpoint where the day got processed and the household reassembled. If “they don’t enjoy the dinner hour together,” it hints at more than logistics; it implies the ritual has lost its authority. It’s not sacred time anymore, just another slot competing with everything else.
Her pivot to mornings is the tell. Breakfast becomes the new last stronghold of togetherness because it’s structurally harder to fracture: everyone starts from the same place before scattering. There’s also a subtle, almost bittersweet reversal in that shift. Evening rituals are about unwinding and storytelling; morning rituals are about staging and efficiency. Couric’s “interesting” carries a double meaning: it’s sociological curiosity, and it’s the faint sadness of realizing we’re reorganizing intimacy around the calendar, not around choice.
The subtext is a quiet inventory of modern pressures. Even without naming smartphones, late work hours, kids’ schedules, or the gig economy, you can feel them in the negative space. Dinner used to be the nightly checkpoint where the day got processed and the household reassembled. If “they don’t enjoy the dinner hour together,” it hints at more than logistics; it implies the ritual has lost its authority. It’s not sacred time anymore, just another slot competing with everything else.
Her pivot to mornings is the tell. Breakfast becomes the new last stronghold of togetherness because it’s structurally harder to fracture: everyone starts from the same place before scattering. There’s also a subtle, almost bittersweet reversal in that shift. Evening rituals are about unwinding and storytelling; morning rituals are about staging and efficiency. Couric’s “interesting” carries a double meaning: it’s sociological curiosity, and it’s the faint sadness of realizing we’re reorganizing intimacy around the calendar, not around choice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Family |
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