I ran out of coffee yesterday.
This would ordinarily qualify as one of the least interesting things that could happen to a person, except that this morning I discovered something interesting because of it.
I get up ridiculously early, and most mornings I start drinking coffee at around five o’clock. I have two large mugs, and I have been doing some version of this for years. I discovered coffee in university and have loved it ever since.
But this morning there was no coffee.
Fortunately, there was decaf.
So I made myself a cup and went about my morning. It was warm. It tasted good. I enjoyed it enough, in fact, that after a while I completely forgot that I had only consumed decaf.
Then something strange happened.
By around 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning, I was tired.
Really tired.
This was unusual enough that I actually started wondering if I was getting sick. Late morning is normally one of my most alert and energetic periods of the day. Instead, I felt sluggish, sleepy and a little less interested in participating in the world than usual.
I started mentally checking for explanations.
Had I slept badly?
Was I coming down with something?
Was something else going on?
And then I remembered.
I hadn’t had any caffeine.
I had the cup. I had the warm drink. I had the taste and the morning ritual.
I just didn’t have the drug.
And apparently my body noticed.
By lunchtime I had procured some actual coffee. I drank it, went home and continued with my day.
By about 3:30 in the afternoon—normally a time when I’m beginning to slow down—I was hitting my stride.
In fact, I was getting ready to publish an essay.
About coffee.
There is something wonderfully circular about that.
Because caffeine is a drug.
Not “sort of like a drug.” Not a substance that becomes a drug if you abuse it. Caffeine is a psychoactive stimulant. It changes the functioning of the central nervous system. It affects alertness and subjective experience. Regular use can produce physical dependence, and abruptly stopping it can produce withdrawal symptoms including headaches, fatigue, irritability and difficulty concentrating.
None of this makes caffeine equivalent to alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, opioids or any other psychoactive substance. Drugs are not interchangeable simply because they belong to the same enormous category. Their effects, risks, impairment, dependence potential and usefulness vary enormously.
Context matters.
Dose matters.
The drug matters.
But caffeine is definitely one of them.
And yet almost nobody talks about coffee that way.
The Drug That Makes You Feel Normal
In fact, caffeine often feels less like altering yourself and more like restoring yourself.
That is a peculiar characteristic for a psychoactive substance to have.
A person who has consumed several alcoholic drinks generally recognizes that they have moved from their ordinary state into an altered one. Cannabis can do the same thing in a very different way.
Coffee often feels like the opposite.
You stumble into the kitchen half conscious, pour yourself a cup, take a few drinks and twenty minutes later think:
Ah. There I am.
We even joke about it.
“Don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee.”
Nobody finds that particularly alarming.
Try changing one word.
“Don’t talk to me before I’ve had my cannabis.”
Now we’ve got questions.
And that’s interesting.
I’m not suggesting that these substances should be treated identically. They shouldn’t. I’m interested in the fact that caffeine occupies such an extraordinarily privileged cultural position that we rarely even put it into the same mental drawer.
Coffee isn’t “drug use.”
It’s coffee.
There is an extremely tempting explanation for this.
Capitalism.
I’ve encountered versions of the argument before, and it goes something like this: Of course modern society approves of caffeine. Caffeine makes people more alert, energetic and productive.
KEEP THEM AT THE MACHINES!
It is easy to make this argument sound cartoonish, but there is a serious version of it that deserves consideration.
A substance whose effects are compatible with socially valued activities is simply going to encounter less resistance than one whose characteristic effects interfere with them.
Employers generally want people awake. They want people attentive. They want people able to concentrate, communicate, drive, calculate, build things, answer questions and remain functional through the working day.
At ordinary doses, caffeine can help with several of those things.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the office coffee pot is acceptable while the office bong is not.
There is also a fascinating question hiding here about whether our working lives have come to depend upon chemical assistance to meet schedules that don’t always align particularly well with natural human energy. I’m going to leave that question alone for now. It deserves an essay of its own.
For the moment, though, the productivity explanation seems pretty compelling.
Maybe caffeine gets a pass because caffeine helps us work.
Except there’s a problem.
Coffee’s extraordinary relationship with human civilization substantially predates the modern workplace.
By centuries.
And once you start following coffee backward through history, the story gets much more interesting.
Before the Office Coffee Pot
The coffee plant is associated originally with Ethiopia, but the recognizable history of coffee as a brewed beverage emerges much more clearly in Yemen by around the fifteenth century.
And one of the earliest well-documented uses of coffee already tells us something important about the drug.
Sufi Muslims used coffee to help remain awake and attentive during nighttime religious observances.
Think about that for a moment.
Centuries before anyone needed coffee to survive a Monday morning staff meeting, human beings were already using caffeine for essentially the same pharmacological reason:
There is something important I want to keep doing, and I would like to remain awake while I do it.
The activity wasn’t economically productive.
It was spiritually important.
That’s a major complication for the capitalism hypothesis right out of the gate.
Coffee helps human beings remain alert and engaged in something they have decided matters.
Apparently, we’ve been finding things that matter for quite some time.
Then People Started Talking
Coffee spread through the Islamic world, and coffeehouses appeared in cities including Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Constantinople.
And this is where coffee stopped being merely a useful stimulant and began becoming something much larger.
People gathered around it.
They talked. They exchanged news. They listened to music and poetry. They played games. They discussed religion and politics. Merchants met. Thinkers thought. People who might not otherwise have encountered one another suddenly had a place to sit together over a stimulating drink.
Naturally, this made authorities nervous.
Coffee and coffeehouses faced restrictions and attempted prohibitions at various points. The problem wasn’t always simply the chemical in the cup. Coffeehouses created social spaces in which information and ideas could circulate.
This is another important clue.
The history of caffeine is not merely the history of a drug.
It is the history of what humans built around the drug.
The cup became attached to conversation.
Conversation became attached to ideas.
Ideas became attached to places.
And the coffeehouse became an institution.
Europe Takes a Sip
Coffee eventually spread into Europe, where it was initially exotic and foreign, strongly associated with the Islamic world from which Europeans had acquired it.
That didn’t stop them from developing quite an appetite for the stuff.
Coffeehouses appeared in England and elsewhere in Europe during the seventeenth century, and they became places for reading, conversation, business, politics and intellectual exchange. English coffeehouses eventually acquired the wonderful nickname “penny universities” because, for roughly the price of a cup, a customer could gain access to conversation, news and ideas.
Notice what is happening to caffeine’s reputation.
This psychoactive substance is not becoming associated primarily with losing control.
It is becoming associated with gaining it.
Alertness.
Conversation.
Information.
Commerce.
Thinking.
The difference matters.
The tavern had alcohol. The coffeehouse had caffeine.
One substance could make you progressively less capable of conducting business as the evening went along.
The other might make you more interested in discussing it.
That doesn’t make coffee morally superior to beer. It does help explain why different substances developed very different cultural identities.
Coffee wasn’t merely tolerated while people did useful things.
Coffee became woven into the useful things themselves.
And Then Things Get Less Noble
No honest celebration of coffee’s history can ignore what happened next.
Europe wanted more of it.
A lot more.
Coffee became an enormously valuable global commodity, and European colonial powers expanded its cultivation through tropical colonies. Plantation coffee became entangled with colonial exploitation, coerced labour and slavery.
This is part of coffee’s history too.
The beautiful café, the intellectual conversation and the invigorating morning cup existed alongside systems capable of enormous human brutality.
Coffee’s history isn’t noble.
It isn’t evil either.
It’s human.
And perhaps that’s part of what makes following it so fascinating. Coffee has travelled through religion, commerce, empire, slavery, revolution, warfare, industrialization, hospitality and ordinary domestic life.
It keeps showing up wherever we do.
Coffee Becomes Patriotic
Then Britain and its North American colonies had a small disagreement about tea.
You may have heard of it.
The Boston Tea Party and the political conflicts surrounding British taxation helped give coffee a new cultural meaning in what would become the United States.
Coffee wasn’t merely something you drank.
It could be something you drank instead of tea.
And therefore something you drank because you weren’t British.
A psychoactive stimulant had acquired a political identity.
This is another reason the simple “society permits caffeine because workers are more productive” explanation doesn’t quite survive the history.
Coffee keeps accumulating meanings that have nothing to do with its pharmacology.
Devotion.
Conversation.
Intellectualism.
Commerce.
Rebellion.
Patriotism.
Hospitality.
And eventually, yes, work.
The Soldier’s Cup
Coffee also became deeply associated with military life.
This makes intuitive sense. If there is one occupation in which remaining alert despite fatigue might occasionally prove useful, soldiering would probably qualify.
During the nineteenth century, coffee became particularly important to American soldiers. It offered warmth, routine, morale and, of course, stimulation.
Again we see the same recurring pattern.
The caffeine isn’t necessarily the activity.
It supports the activity.
A soldier isn’t usually drinking coffee because the day’s main objective is to experience caffeine.
There is something else that needs doing.
Coffee comes along.
This may be one of the most important things about caffeine.
Many psychoactive substances can become the event.
Coffee is remarkably good at becoming the companion to the event.
Coffee and prayer.
Coffee and conversation.
Coffee and reading.
Coffee and commerce.
Coffee and studying.
Coffee and driving.
Coffee and soldiering.
Coffee and writing.
Coffee and sitting quietly while absolutely nothing productive happens at all.
It doesn’t demand that the world rearrange itself around the altered state.
At ordinary doses, the altered state fits remarkably easily into the world that was already there.
Now We Can Talk About Capitalism
Eventually, of course, industrial society arrives.
Now the productivity hypothesis starts becoming much more interesting.
Factories and offices run according to clocks. Human energy does not.
The clock doesn’t particularly care that you slept badly last night.
The assembly line isn’t deeply interested in your circadian rhythm.
The nine o’clock meeting does not automatically reschedule itself because your brain would really rather become fully operational at eleven.
And here is this legal, inexpensive, widely available stimulant that human beings have already been consuming for centuries.
At which point capitalism presumably looked at coffee and said:
Oh, we’re keeping THIS. KEEP THEM AT THE MACHINES!
But capitalism didn’t invent the relationship.
It inherited it.
That’s the distinction I find so interesting.
The modern workplace didn’t create humanity’s love affair with caffeine. It encountered an ancient and extraordinarily adaptable psychoactive relationship and discovered that the effects of the drug happened to fit industrial and administrative life extremely well.
Which eventually brings us to one of my favourite institutions in the entire story.
The coffee break.
Or, if we temporarily strip away several generations of cultural familiarity:
THE EMPLOYER-SANCTIONED PSYCHOACTIVE-STIMULANT INTERMISSION.
Everyone stop operating the machinery for fifteen minutes.
Go socialize.
Rest briefly.
Consume the stimulant.
Then return.
And the funny thing is, this is probably a pretty good idea.
Because practically every component of the traditional coffee break might help.
You stop working.
You stand up.
You move.
You socialize.
You drink something pleasurable.
You consume something warm.
You get psychological distance from the task.
You consume caffeine.
Then you go back.
It’s not simply a drug-delivery system.
It’s a tiny restoration ritual.
And perhaps that’s why the coffee break has survived as such a beloved idea even in workplaces where nobody is literally required to drink coffee.
The caffeine is only one component of something humans may genuinely need: periodic permission to stop.
The Drug Disappears Into the Cup
Perhaps pleasure has something to do with why caffeine becomes so culturally invisible.
Coffee is an extraordinarily pleasant delivery system for a psychoactive substance.
There is the aroma.
The warmth.
The taste.
The favourite mug.
The morning ritual.
The café.
The conversation.
The break.
The person across the table.
“Would you like to come over for coffee?”
“Let’s grab a coffee.”
“I’ll put some coffee on.”
Imagine replacing coffee throughout our culture with caffeine tablets.
You wake up every morning, walk into the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, swallow a couple of caffeine pills and head to work.
Same active drug.
Very different cultural experience.
Coffee wraps the pharmacology inside pleasure, hospitality and ritual.
Eventually the pharmacology almost disappears.
We don’t think:
I am administering a psychoactive central-nervous-system stimulant.
We think:
Coffee.
And perhaps that is exactly as it should be.
Calling caffeine a drug doesn’t require us to strip coffee of everything else it has become.
A cup of coffee can be a drug-delivery mechanism and an invitation to conversation.
It can produce physical dependence and be an expression of hospitality.
It can have pharmacological effects and taste wonderful.
It can help someone work and help someone sit around doing absolutely nothing.
These aren’t contradictions.
They’re different levels of description.
Back to My Kitchen
Which brings me back to this morning.
I ran out of coffee.
I substituted decaf.
I enjoyed it enough that I forgot I hadn’t actually consumed any caffeine.
Then, during what is normally one of my most energetic periods of the day, I became so inexplicably tired that for a moment I wondered whether I might be getting sick.
Eventually I remembered the missing variable.
So around lunchtime I bought some coffee.
I drank it.
And several hours later, at a time of day when I would ordinarily be slowing down, I was instead hitting my stride.
Fully caffeinated, I began enthusiastically working on an essay about caffeine.
I’m not planning to quit.
I’m not suggesting you should quit.
I’m not suggesting employers remove the coffee machines or that governments start putting frightening warning labels on cappuccinos.
And I’m certainly not suggesting that because caffeine is a psychoactive drug, all psychoactive drugs should therefore be treated alike.
I’m suggesting something much less dramatic.
Look at the cup.
There is a drug in there.
A real one.
But there are also centuries of human history in there.
There are Ethiopian plants and Yemeni religious communities. There are Ottoman coffeehouses and nervous authorities. There are European intellectuals and colonial plantations. There are revolutions and soldiers and factories and diners and office break rooms. There are first dates and university exams and long drives and early mornings and conversations that went on longer because neither person was quite ready to leave.
Capitalism certainly found caffeine useful.
Of course it did.
So did religion.
So did commerce.
So did armies.
So did intellectuals.
So did revolutionaries.
So did students.
So did writers.
So did friends who simply wanted to sit together for another hour.
Perhaps caffeine occupies such an unusual position among psychoactive substances not because humanity somehow forgot that it is a drug, but because over hundreds of years we discovered something unusually convenient about this particular one.
At ordinary doses, caffeine usually doesn’t ask us to leave the world.
It helps us stay in it.
Awake a little longer.
Interested a little longer.
Talking a little longer.
Working a little longer, yes.
But also praying, thinking, reading, driving, laughing, arguing, visiting and creating a little longer.
Coffee helps human beings remain alert and engaged in something they have decided matters.
And apparently, for several centuries now, we’ve decided that quite a lot of things matter.
Including, today, an essay about coffee.
No comments:
Post a Comment