Four coffee shops.
Today, I went to four coffee shops, searching for a booth with an outlet: an old diner, a slick espresso bar, a bagel shop, and a chain. And none of them had a table with an outlet nearby. Nowhere to hunker down and recharge – nowhere to write. I understand that COVID has changed things. But these coffee shops weren’t built without outlets, were they?
It should be clear, by this point, I have a bit of a bone to pick with caffeine culture – despite my complicity. After all, I do love my morning coffee. I can even be a snob about it, at my worst. But it occupies too great a place in my life, in my heart, in my routine, to entertain any abstinence. My morning feels incomplete without it. The news, my robe, a slice of toast – are as incomplete without coffee as the morning is without sunrise. I’ll always have one cup, each day. But I’m starting to question cups number two, three, and four. And I’m beginning to wonder: is anyone else having this much trouble sleeping?
I mean: let’s look at the caffeine molecule itself. For one, it’s got an extremely long half-life, even for a stimulant, which means that it takes, on average, a full 5 hours for healthy humans to metabolize half of the caffeine in their system. But tolerance varies widely from person to person, more than it does for other drugs. Some people drink all day, metabolizing their caffeine in as quickly as 2 hours. Some people are extremely sensitive, feeling the effects of their morning cup for as long as nine hours.
So – bearing that in mind – tell me: when’s the last time you saw anything resembling “dosage” information on your bag of coffee? It’s a drug – why don’t they list caffeine content? Or at least a range of how many milligrams might be in your cup, depending on brew strength? Maybe it’s easier to form a habit when you’re not keeping tabs. Maybe there’s a lot of money to be made off the enthusiastically uninformed. Or maybe, there’s nothing all that wrong with being addicted to something cheap, plentiful, and harmless in normal doses.
But the notion of what’s “normal” is changing. I look around, and everywhere, caffeine culture is changing. The culture of ideas that existed in those old Arabian qahveh khaneh? And the intellectual communities that coalesced around the Viennese coffee houses? It’s not like I had any firsthand experience… But, tell me: do you see anything resembling a “School of the Wise” or “Penny University?”
I don’t.
I don’t even see people talk to each other for the most part. I worked in a drive-thru coffee shop as a teenager, and what I saw there still scares me. Single-serve beverages, with as many calories as a thanksgiving dinner, and as much caffeine as a pot of coffee. The same people, ordering them every day, drawn back not by a sense of community or social enthusiasm, but by the substance, alone.
This miracle drug, one of the great gifts of our natural world, is being abused on a global scale. We’ve lost respect for the power of this molecule to the point where we’re allowing it to alter our humanity on a systemic level.
As much as I love my coffee, I can’t ignore the problems posed by the multibillion-dollar global behemoth that is the caffeine industry. This is, at the root, a group of business interests upon which most consumers – most people – are dependent. A dependency which is, at best, ignored – and at worst, seen as one of many necessary evils inherent in a capitalist system. It’s won wars, birthed new economies, and the industrial revolution could not have been possible without it. But this dependency is no longer just a personal addiction to a favorite beverage. It’s a collective, worldwide reliance on a substance to keep up with the pace demanded by our ultra-competitive, (frequently) zero-sum global economy. We’re addicted to staying awake because everyone around us is, too. We have a chemically-altered baseline; that an “awake” human is a caffeinated one.
Our professional lives demand, at once, that we show up for the day both well-rested and out of our minds on stimulants. We wake up tired, consume more and more to stave off withdrawal, stay wired well past our bedtime, sleep terribly, rinse and repeat. It’s unsustainable – in many, many ways. Modest market predictions estimate at least a 10% growth in the coffee industry alone over the next decade. But as the climate warms, the plant becomes harder to grow. The extreme elevations needed for growing the plant aren’t as cold anymore, the soil worsens, and the available, farmable land shrinks.
And there will be a point, in the near future, where this whole system catches fusion. Where demand for caffeine vastly exceeds supply. Thinking back to the line outside the La Guardia Starbucks, I’m picturing a zombie-apocalypse scenario… I’ll be back – right after I finish stocking my bunker with frozen sacks of espresso beans.
