A corporate marketing executive who says she manages both people and AI agents on her org chart has made a case in The Guardian for reviving the three-martini lunch as a deliberate strategy to counteract what she calls a workplace loneliness epidemic.
Andrea Javor, 46, wrote that the long, unhurried business meals that were once a fixture of American professional life have largely disappeared, replaced by desk-bound lunches, Teams chats, and fleeting video calls. She argued that the loss has eroded the personal connections that made business relationships durable and that the three-martini lunch — alcohol optional — should be reclaimed as a forum for genuine connection.
“Anyone can generate output using technology, but the three-martini lunch was a singular opportunity to mix business and pleasure, a phenomenon that is increasingly missing during the AI revolution,” Javor wrote in the op-ed published Thursday.
Javor described her experience as a modern-day “Don Draper equivalent,” a reference to the fictional advertising executive known for long client lunches. She said that when she entered the business world in the early 2000s, sales vendors would invite her to restaurants for casual meetings over salads, and she would chat about weather and family before any pitch. “There was a softness to the approach, and I actually made lasting friendships over the decades with a handful of clients and vendors,” she wrote.
Today, she said, she is more likely to build connections over a Teams chat or a fleeting video call. “I haven’t yet enjoyed any of this ‘free time’ the bot was meant to add to my day,” she wrote.
Javor traced the decline of the long business lunch to multiple forces. The phrase “three-martini lunch” first surfaced in a 1950 newspaper column, she wrote, as a casual observation of New York professional excess. In 1976, President Jimmy Carter wielded the term as a political weapon, arguing that working-class taxpayers were subsidizing the indulgences of the privileged through business meal deductions. She quoted former President Gerald Ford’s 1978 joke that the ritual was “the epitome of American efficiency,” asking, “Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?”
The subsequent rise of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture, reinforced by shows such as “The Apprentice” and books including “The 4-Hour Workweek,” turned constant productivity into a moral virtue, Javor wrote. By the 2010s, social media and the “rise and grind” ethos made desk-bound solitary lunches feel like a necessary concession for career advancement.
Javor said the return-to-office mandates many companies implemented after the pandemic have failed to reverse the trend. She cited recent research from Boston University and a Bamboo HR survey indicating that more than a quarter of workers said RTO mandates actually deepened divides between colleagues. “We’ve lost a bit of humanity as tools reign supreme, and we’ve forgotten what authentic connection actually entails,” she wrote.
As a manager, Javor wrote, it has become harder to get to know her team. Emails generated by large language models “are all starting to sound the same.” The spontaneous conversations — what she called “drive-bys” where someone comes to ask the boss a question — have become rare. “Some things require presence, unhurried time and the willingness to prioritize connection for its own sake, rather than as a means to close a deal,” she wrote. “Connection can’t be tracked, though it can be felt.”