Did you know that approximately 1.6 billion cups of Coffee are drunk daily? Or that (according to World Atlas) the top five drinking Coffee nations are Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and the Netherlands? How about Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia being the most prolific Coffee producers?
What I’m sure you do know is that our modern world owes much to the humble Coffee bean. Using simple mental explication (relative to the fact that such vast quantities of Coffee are drunk by globally-influential people daily), you’d be foolhardy to dismiss the effect this mind-blowing commodity has etched into modern history.
Like almost everyone, I too am a pawn in our Coffee-dictated global zeitgeist. Like multitudes the world over, I dose up daily, based on the fact that Coffee is not only enjoyable to drink, but it also propels me creatively and energetically.
But does a meta-price exist to maintain this caffeine-laden status quo?
I’ve drunk A LOT of Coffee over the years. Due to this, I feel I’m qualified to say that Coffee, in its own way, promotes existential dishevelment. Now, what the fuggin’ hell is existential dishevelment!? I’m going to say it’s the tenuous relationship between creative productivity and a biologically well-regulated emotional life.
Dude, what?
While I’m no researcher who can provide up-to-the-minute stats backing my hypothesis, I do have a Coffee-free childhood to support my thinking. As a caffeine-free child, I literally WAS my environment, an unimpeded biological limb floating free in the Gaian over-system. Sans the weight of a Coffee-mutated biology, I experienced a subtler, more holistic reality that offered me equal portions of reflection and projection.
Now, as a working-class grunt who downs dangerous daily doses just to make ends meet, that child-sweetened existential landscape lives on as but a memory. And sometimes, in the silences bookmarking my caffeine-raging blinkered reality, I find myself lamenting what’s been lost by me wantonly swallowing the capitalist-crafted Coffee-swilling status quo.
That’s not the worst thing. Despite knowing how indentured I am to Coffee, I remain too weak to banish my overlording caffeinated denial.
Yes, Coffee may well be the siren chorusing the slow-burn apocalypse.