I came to the same conclusion after seeing all my family drinking at least 3 cups daily. Then all my friend, then me being 15 years old started.
About 13 years later I’ve quit cold turkey after having some anxiety problems and headaches. I did some research and read a book which is from the nineties and a bit outdated but holds up pretty good. It basically cured both problems (but withdrawal symptoms the first days were tough, I admit).
For many people it’s ok to drink coffee I guess, but consider that it can affect you and almost no doctor will look into coffee consumption when you pay them a visit to see what could be the reason of some of those ailments. Also I saved a good chunk of money.
So no, you don’t need coffee. You need to give your brain a break (sleep properly) if it asks for it, and you don’t need to drug yourself with substances to “focus” and go on with your life. If life isn’t exciting then you may want to change it.
I recommend reading r/decaf for some interesting testimonies.
> If life isn’t exciting then you may want to change it.
I, like many people, need to exchange my time for a paycheck. During this time I often have to pay close attention to minute details in a text document, and think through implications of design proposals. As much as I enjoy it and feel very fortunate to have such a comfortable and mentally stimulating job, the fact is that it just isn't always going to be exciting. I imagine that dedicating myself to any worthwhile effort over a long period of time would result in many periods during which optimal excitement levels are not achieved.
I'm in the position to already know exactly what my life would be like without coffee, as I grew up Mormon and believed I was personally commanded to not drink coffee or tea by the creator and sustainer of the universe. The result was: I was sleepy at inopportune times. It didn't matter how much sleep I got, or how interested I was in the subject matter. I just got sleepy when I needed to sit still and pay close attention to things. It wasn't ever a huge deal, and I was able to work around it, but that's just how it was. I don't think my sleepiness was particularly unusual or extreme. I just think that humans aren't optimally evolved to sit in math lectures or review intricate documents on a daily schedule.
As soon as I started drinking coffee, there was noticeable improvement. No more than 2 cups per workday. One in the morning, another in the afternoon. My sleepiness all but went away entirely. Ever since then I've been slightly more productive. Like I said, it's not a huge thing, but it's an obvious improvement. If I gave it up as part of some righteous attempt to remove my excitement crutches or whatever, the long term result would simply be: I'd be sleepy more often.
> I, like many people, need to exchange my time for a paycheck. During this time I often have to pay close attention to minute details in a text document, and think through implications of design proposals.
Anecdotally, I can concentrate and focus a LOT better when I get a plenty of sleep and exercise and don’t drink any coffee at all for at least a few days beforehand.
I do love the flavour of coffee though so I still drink it, but I try to keep my intake low.
> The result was: I was sleepy at inopportune times.
I’m certainly no expert and definitely don’t know your specific circumstances, but on the surface this looks like a sleep hygiene or even diet issue.
> One in the morning, another in the afternoon.
I don’t know what age you are but I used to do this in my twenties and never had any problems sleeping, but in my thirties a coffee in the afternoon really messed with my sleep, although it took a few visits to the doctor to realise. I now very rarely drink coffee after about 1300 and I sleep a lot better. Basically, if you’re young, you can get away with it but be careful. If you’re not young then... maybe your body handles it differently, lucky.
> I can concentrate and focus a LOT better when I get a plenty of sleep and exercise and don’t drink any coffee at all for at least a few days beforehand.
Confirmed. I've been off for a few months now. Getting a good night's sleep is the key.
Interesting. I never drank coffee in my twenties, and only started in my thirties. I now realize that I would have had a better time during undergrad, grad school, and part of my career had I drank coffee in my twenties as well.
I’ve had a similar experience, although with one notable exception: within a week after I began microdosing a certain psychedelic, I spontaneously decided to quit caffeine cold turkey and had no qualms about it. Like some inner voice just said “why the hell do you have to push the accelerator so hard?” and there was no sensible answer so I quit. Unfortunately, that was short-lived because I don’t have a steady microdose supply so now I’ve reverted to my old ways.
It might go beyond the temperature of the liquid, though: caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, meaning it restricts blood flow to your extremities, meaning you'd be better at retaining your core temperature. (That said, you should also be "feeling" colder in your hands and feet.)
(This is the opposite effect of alcohol, which is a vasodilator: it makes you feel warm by filling your extremities and outer layers with blood, but at the cost of actually losing core temperature. Hence drunk people easily freezing to death in winter.)
Caffeine is generally thought of as a vasodilator. It's a bit more complex than that, but it definitely doesn't restrict blood flow to your extremities.
I've actually quit coffee a few times for 6+ month periods. One thing you'll notice, or at least I did, coffee just didn't taste that good, and your mind quickly connects the caffeine rush it's going to get. Even trying to drink decalf wasn't a worthwhile endeavor (even though there's still a tiny bit of caffeine in it). I imagine, it's a variation of a junkie not loving to put the needle in their arms, but anticipating their high.
Note: I don't drink coffee "drinks" like mochas, lattes, frappachinos, etc. just drink black coffee, without sugar and milk .
This reminds me how Australia solved its beetle problem with a toad problem. One day, they were like, why are we letting all these beetles eat our sugar cane. Lets bring in toads to eat the beetles.
I'm not sure, but depending on how micro your dose was, it might have had a similar wakeful effect. Anecdotally and based on experiences of people I've spoken to, psilocybin tends to keep people awake. Some even say they couldn't possibly fall asleep for anywhere from 6 to 12 hours after taking a dose intended for psychedelic effects. Perhaps in micro doses it has the same effect but more mildly.
I'll second that. Growing up, I saw my father drinking lots of coffee every day, and complaining about his "addiction". This simply registered as a bad thing in my mind, so I avoided coffee at all costs until I was about 30. Even now, I still have a "moral" repulsion towards coffee, if you wish. Most non-working days, I don't touch coffee. So, I was able to get through a PhD without caffeine. But, man, how many times was I sleepy. The worse was being sleepy at the wheel. How many times did I not started dozing for a few seconds while driving (never got into an accident though). And no, I was not sleep deprived.
There are people, like me, who are sleepy at times, despite not skimping on their sleep.
I will note though, that for the last 6 weeks I did not drink any coffee, with all the work-from-home thing. I drink only tea nowadays.
It's irrational for me. I simply don't associate tea with "wrong". I also know that tea has much less caffeine than coffee.
The experience so far was good. The only unpleasant thing is that I get nausea from simple tea, so I need to use cream and a sweetener, and sometimes even with that I still get nausea.
Long term I would like to be able to ditch caffeine completely. But it's not really on my top 10 todo list.
> So no, you don’t need coffee. You need to give your brain a break (sleep properly) if it asks for it, and you don’t need to drug yourself with substances to “focus” and go on with your life.
I'd suggest that the reason so many people drink so much coffee is that giving their brain a break by getting plenty of sleep and R&R is just not feasible.
Take people with small children, for one. Unless you're very lucky, you won't be getting regular quality sleep for 5+ years after having your first child. If you have more than one, then extend this period as necessary.
People don't drink 3+ cups of coffee a day to be their best self living their best life. They drink that much coffee to function at all when they have no other option.
Well, to be clear, I was reacting to the specific statement that people only drink three coffees because they have some problem in their life. If you want to cut down on your coffee use, have at it, but do so without casting aspersion onto those who think otherwise.
Otherwise, to me it’s tiresome when any sort of substance is critiqued because it doesn’t fit the standard sober societal narrative, especially because it’s assumed that people are incapable of making decisions for themselves. It is a sort of creeping, subtle Puritanism and is usually totally arbitrary; you’ll see the same people gleefully talk about marijuana yet call tobacco users dumb. These things have costs and benefits and a mature society should be able to rationally discuss them, rather than act like a heavy-handed nanny. As an American living in Europe, this seems to be less of a problem in somewhere like France or Italy that has a tradition of wine cultivation. America seems to always skew to the extremes of over-indulgence or prohibition.
I simply don’t agree with the idea that everything with a supposedly negative health effect is necessarily a bad thing. Intoxication and substance use has played an important role in art and culture for thousands of years. To casually dismiss it just seems really short-sighted.
I could write more about this but these are my summarized thoughts.
>America seems to always skew to the extremes of over-indulgence or prohibition.
I completely disagree. You must live in a different bubble than I do and most of HN. Most of the people here support the idea of experimentation with LSD or other psychedelics.
>I simply don’t agree with the idea that everything with a supposedly negative health effect is necessarily a bad thing. Intoxication and substance use has played an important role in art and culture for thousands of years. To casually dismiss it just seems really short-sighted.
To casually support the idea that substance abuse hasn't harmed society seems pretty short sighted as well. Alcohol being a big one, it has such a negative societal impact, yet we are scared to broach the idea in a public forum.
Well I meant more America in general, not so much HN. I doubt the average person, even in somewhere like Northern California, is really encouraging of psychedelics.
And sure of course alcohol and other substance abuse has harmed society and continues to. I’m merely suggesting that moderation is a better solution than prohibition.
I would go further and even say that on HN you see these extremes. People that previously consumed massive, unhealthy amounts of coffee now authoring testimonials and blog posts about how life is better without coffee. People that previously could not go 5 minutes without checking news headlines and Twitter hot takes now authoring testimonials and blog posts about how life is so much better when lived in total ignorance of current events. Lukewarm takes about moderation aren't inspiring and dynamic enough to generate views, upvotes, and discussion. We're always looking for that neat life hack, and "don't do quite as much of X and maybe do a little more of Y" is not very neat.
> giving their brain a break by getting plenty of sleep and R&R is just not feasible.
That sounds like some nasty health problems in the making. Over caffeinated, over stimulated and far too little sleep. It’s a recipe for disaster. I’ve seen first hand how it affected my health and I’m still dealing with consequences, although am a lot better now (stress was also a factor) and I’ve seen how drastically coffee addiction can affect people as I’ve had family members who were (past tense luckily) so addicted they were unable to function without multiple very strong cups a day. It was horrible. Be careful people, use stimulants in moderation and be careful not to become completely dependent!
For short periods when you’re super busy, sure, no problem! But every day long term? You’ll damage yourself.
>People don't drink 3+ cups of coffee a day to be their best self living their best life. They drink that much coffee to function at all when they have no other option.
They maybe something is deeply wrong with out current system.
I give up both alcohol and caffeine for one month every year. I've currently been off caffeine for 2 months. The most pronounced effect is by far the consistent energy levels throughout the day. It's an incredible feeling to wake up in the morning, before sun rise, and just be "ready to go"! You forget what that's like after years of coffee consumption.
I also found I'm much more aware of other folks who are hyped up on caffeine or needing more.
The biggest loss for me is the positive effect that caffeine had on my weightlifting capabilities (via incr blood pressure).
Ultimately I think giving up caffeine for the rest of my life would be the most logical decision; but it's not something I've ever even considered. Habits that act as crutches can have such a powerful hold on our lives.
Thanks. Interesting read. I have cut down my coffee consumption but I still drink it regularly (and I mean that; I drink at at the exact same times every day). Reading about your experiences shows me that I'm really not dependent on the drug. I don't use it a crutch like you did.
I have, however, completely cut out alcohol so I sympathise with the bit about social situations. This was odd for me at first too. At certain evening events you are expected to have a drink at all times. I don't know why, but it's awkward if you don't have one. Water doesn't cut it. It has to be sparkling or brightly coloured or something. I discovered that I can ask for a lime soda pretty much anywhere and it's not too sweet and seems to completely satisfy the need for a drink. It's also cheap. I don't miss alcohol one bit.
As for the laxative effect of coffee, this is something I enjoy. I really hate the feeling I get when my bowels are not regular. The best times of my life are ones where I can set my watch by my bowel movements. It makes a huge difference to my life! So I'm glad if coffee helps me stay regular.
An informative article! And this is the key issue: "One needs to gradually and continually increase the amount of caffeine consumed in order to experience the stimulant effect.".
I wish there were more decaf options. Good decaf is delicious. There was this startup: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/a-bold-new-w... that unfortunately never got off the ground. There are also beans from the Swiss water decaf process that you can find at some speciality cafes. What I'd like is a 50/50 blend of decaf/regular beans, something with the content more of tea than coffee.
My dad drank 5+ cups per day, into the evenings. I can't attribute anything, but the guy was the biggest mess of nerves I've seen in my life.
Thanks, I might subscribe once I run out. It took me a while of hunting through their site to find the decaf options, I actually had to start a membership and enter a credit card number to find the it. Now I'm trying to cancel (5 minutes after registering), and it turns out I have to actually email them to cancel it. There's no way for me to cancel through the site. There's also no option to remove my credit card, I can only change it. To change it, for some reason it asks for my email and full name/address again even though I am logged in. This is an unpleasant process and seems more predatory than a porn site, so I might seek an alternative.
I also drink decaf and in my experience (Europe mostly Switzerland), the majority of coffee shops offer it. Just ask. The selection at the supermarket is very limited here, though.
I cut down on my coffee consumption drastically. I used to drink sometimes 6 cups a day as a student, and well into the night. Now I have two cups a day: one in the morning and one at lunch time. I find that my sleep is good because I'm off caffeine by ~23:00 when I go to sleep.
I have completely stopped alcohol, though. That was far, far more detrimental to me health than caffeine and I would encourage others to look at that first before looking at caffeine. There are many benefits of caffeine. There are none for alcohol.
I was never dependent on either drug, though. I often go without coffee when I'm travelling and it's not practical; I don't notice it. The only drug I've had withdrawal symptoms from is cannabis.
> I’ve quit cold turkey after having some anxiety problems and headaches
Use no-doz pills to quit without side effects: reduce/taper/titrate the dose down from one pill per morning to, part-pills, to none over a few weeks.
I quit every few years, and just stopping is very unpleasant. Using caffeine-only No-doz pills as above is cheap and easy. I’ve also done it by using instant coffee and reducing the size of the spoonful of coffee, although it’s mentally harder to break the habit that way. Edit: I guess heavy coffee drinkers might need to start at two pills (check dosage info on package: I've always been fine starting at one). They taste nasty bitter, but OK if quickly washed down with water.
I didn’t know about those pills but they do contain caffeine as you say, so it was no good for me even if temporal. Some people switch to decaf coffee only to find out that it has some caffeine and still affects them. I can’t vouch for that personally but seems a common occurrence.
But it’s a good alternative for those who see it as an impossible task, and also yourself. In my case I had to take NSAIDs - which I very rarely take - for a couple days just to get by (since the vasoconstriction “feature” of coffee wasn’t present anymore, headache ensues) but then I was ok, just tired for some weeks.
That's a good idea. People have this weird fear of caffeine pills, but many of them are just 100mg of caffeine. That's a cup of coffee. Don't abuse them, and for what you are talking about (easing off caffeine) they are are a great way to easily taper your dose, which can be hard with liquids.
Fear of accidentally high doses of caffeine is founded, especially if you don't fully trust the measurement or quality (e.g. for those sourced from a certain knock-off-prone online retailer).
Excedrin is acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine so it helps with the headache and allows you to taper off the caffeine. I trust the accuracy of GSK’s dosage infinitely more than I trust some gas station caffeine pills for college kids.
I think worrying about measurement or quality is being over-cautious. Caffeine is not difficult to source high purity since it is added to drinks etc, and is extracted AFAIK, so risks of quality issues are low. Measurement risks are low because 100mg is a sizeable percentage of the pill volume, so it would be very difficult to reach a bad dose (let alone a lethal dose of 100 pills). 100mg is what you might get from a large or strong cup of coffee.
If worried, buy a known brand from a pharmacy for maybe the price of two coffees.
Rather than drink less quantity (I don't wanna drink a quarter cup of coffee!), the easiest way I've found is to gradually titrate the coffee with decaf. That way you're not disrupting the ritual while you break the chemical addiction. The same method (gradually turning down the dose, while still indulging the ritual) has seen excellent results for nicotine addiction by using a vape.
Tapering makes a huge difference, and in my own experience, you can taper down pretty quickly. I went from ~5 cups per day down to 1 in 3 days and didn’t really notice it. Caffeine withdrawal from 1 cup a day isn’t that bad.
I had trouble sleeping at the start of the lockdown when I realised my caffeine intake had gone way up, I was drinking 4-5 coffees a day instead of my usual 2. I decided to quit caffeine for a while, I had always thought about quitting just to see how a cup of coffee would work when I wan't drinking so much. I'm off it five weeks now and can't see myself going back to drinking it every day, only as a treat or when really needed as I do enjoy it.
I'm getting some slight anxiety/headache problems from drinking too much coffee, but strangely, I also get them from drinking decaf. Am I alone in this, and what could cause it if it's not the caffeine? (I've ruled out dehydration)
You’re not alone, I mention this fact in this same comment thread. Decaf does have caffeine and if you’re sensitive to it then you’ll still develop sides. This isn’t from my experience (I quit completely at once) but from many experiences that I’ve read. It also happens if you take a bit too much dark chocolate. I’m not saying this is your case as this definitely isn’t the single universal source of anxiety and headaches but you may want to try quitting completely and see how you feel. I noticed it within 1-2 weeks but then I was taking 5-6 cups sometimes.
The book is “Caffeine blues”. There may be better ones or just more up-to-date but this is a popular one among decaf circles and I had easy access to it.
I hope that someday cafe culture makes a comeback. As much as I love sitting in a cafe working on my laptop, the current iteration of cafes is but a pale imitation of what they were in the past.
Revolutions were plotted, art movements invented, and history made in places like Cafe Central in Vienna. I recommend reading literature from the 1880s-1930s to get a sense of how important they were for the time period. A Moveable Feast by Hemingway is a good start.
A return to 19th century cafe culture is perhaps a bit optimistic.
I would be satisfied with a re-emergence early-90's (that is 1990's) chill coffee house. But those days are gone too. I'd say it's because of two reasons: Real Estate (rent too damn high) and no time because everyone is either working or not in the right head-space.
There was a time in 1990's where one could read about 19th-century flaneurs and actually think they were also a flaneur, spending all afternoon in a coffee house hanging out with random people, talking about cool stuff. I did it, for a very short while then -poof-, it was gone.
The Cafe Mediterraneum[0] in Berkeley retained this kind of atmosphere until a few years ago (money issues from what I heard.)
I hung out there on a daily basis for a year or so, and it was like I'd finally found the social environment designed for me: I could go in and just read, or work on whatever I was working on—and typically before long I'd be joined by someone from a fairly large ring of folks who knew each other to varying degrees. There was a kernel of us who all knew each other very well (many had known each other for years or decades even), and then a larger outer circle who would sometimes join in or not but were always around.
Occasionally you'd strike up conversation with someone new just because you both had been showing up regularly for a while, and associating with some common people, "Hi, I'm XXX—I see you've been talking with YYY recently. What are those books you have there?" (If you were showing up regularly enough, then you were becoming a "Med Head," which meant you probably had enough in common with any other Med Head that an interesting / amicable conversation would likely result.)
There was a rhythm through the week and month when traffic patterns changed or periodic events were held (e.g. Tango night once a month). We knew all the staff and the owner, and at least bits about the life stories and work of a group of regulars numbering somewhere around... 30 maybe? As much as our conversations might be about philosophy, literature, linguistics, mathematics, etc.—they were as often just gossip related to the community there or around town.
If you were talking about something that sounded interesting, it was not uncommon for people at nearby tables to chime in, and if that was going well we might join our tables together and continue. It was open until midnight and we'd almost always stay until then, often chatting more rather than working as the time got later. At some point people would pick up instruments or someone would hop on the piano and improvise something while the rest of us continued talking. Maybe a couple times a month a couple of us would order a beer from behind the counter as the night was ending. Several nights a week a group of us would go on a walk around town after closing.
Since then, I've considered the existence of a place like that to be the biggest draw to living somewhere—but I haven't had much luck finding it. I was optimistic that Cambridge (MA) would have something, but I never found it.
I remember hanging out at Urbus Orbis in Bucktown in Chicago in the early 1990s. Great magazine selection for sale, strong coffee and meeting many artists who became my friends and leading me to discover metalworking as an artform. Community could form in the 3rd space, between home and work. Other cafes such as Jinx coffeehouse on Division St. as well as local bars contributed to the 1990s Wicker Park/Bucktown vibes.
> Urbus Orbis, says Handley, "fits every criterion of a classic third place--it's large and a little dirty, it's supercasual and convenient.
Interesting. The “Med” had all those features as well. I think they’re all important, but the criterion for it to be “a little dirty” is especially interesting:
Everyone knew this about the Med, and it was in part because so many people practically lived there, including many homeless traveling through Berkeley who might hear from friends that you could charge your phone and wash up there (plus it was on Telegraph which seemed to always be coated in a thin layer of black dust). But I think it was especially important because it acted as a kind of filter: if you were too much on the snobby side you wouldn’t be willing to linger in the slightly grimy atmosphere. (And sure enough, I had the experience many times asking people I met in SF or Berkeley if they ever went to the Med and getting a look of distaste / puzzlement.)
You just made me think of a chill coffee house on the Ohio State University campus that I always loved to study in late at night, back in the 90s, named Insomnia. It had a culture all its own. Lots of great people, lots of great conversation over checkers and chess. I never found another place like it and I completely forgot about it just a couple of years later. It's a shame that they didn't survive, though I'm not surprised. The rent is too damn high, and all of that.
There's actually a lot of these sort of 90s cafes still around in major cities at least. They accumulate a cult following and host events like open mics regularly. The cafe as a business might not be long lived, but the vibe never really dies so there are always at least a couple in every major metro.
I couldn’t find them in SF or Cambridge. I mean if the threshold is “hosts an open mic” sure, there are plenty. But places that have a substantial / interacting community, where regular customers become friends and the atmosphere is casual/inviting enough for strangers to join in, seem to be few and far between.
From personal experience, a small college town can support exactly this kind of atmosphere. Someplace with a healthy mixture of faculty, students and "townies".
The one I frequented almost every day of my master's, it had exactly what you describe. No open mic though :)
All the regulars knew each other, the proprietor was abundantly welcoming and chatty, and new-comers regularly got drawn into whatever the running topic happened to be that day. Opened in 2012 and still going strong as of the start of the pandemic.
I can't speak to larger cities. I imagine the rent issue is a significant obstacle there.
I'm not "cool" by any means but hanging out in cafes for hours without working still happens, I know because I do it (or I used to, before this virus). I always bring a book or a magazine to read with me and I also have my small-ish iPhone SE for HN browsing and that's about it. And I'm not the only one doing it, I almost always see other people just sitting with a book in their hands and drinking a coffee.
My gf works from time to time on her laptop while enjoying our coffee but I myself haven't had a "modern" laptop for quite some time (my last laptop is a Mac from 2009) and as such I never bring work with me to the coffee house. I agree that not having kids yet helps with this lifestyle.
Then you aren’t thinking about it in context. One reason as to why people hung out in coffee shops talking all day has to do with climate. This was a phenomenon in particularly cold climates with inclement weather. So clearly, it was worse to be stuck outside in the cold and rain than inside in the warmth, surrounded by friends and a steaming cup of coffee.
This was my late teens and early 20s on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. A long, wet, cold, relentless "winter" can only be beaten by warm drinks and good friends. Actually, they don't even have to be great friends, haha. Just need to get out of the house and remind yourself there's more than rain and grey.
Hey, it was great while it lasted and I'm not embarrassed to call it sentimental. What else were you gonna do as an 18-25 year old in the afternoons in 1992, work? Ha! :-)
What would it take to get this social aspect of cafes back? Exclusivity? No-smartphone rule? Dedicated discussion times? How do you envision us bringing this back while adapting to modern social norms?
I think the key difference (from reading Wikipedia) is that people used to go to coffeehouses to socialise with whatever other regulars happen to be there, in the same way that you'd go to the pub knowing that a bunch of mates are bound to be there on a Friday night (this is also becoming much less common).
People don't go to a cafe expecting to socialise with whoever is there, you go to see a friend that you've planned ahead to see, rather than socialise with others. Cafes have become a vehicle for social interaction, rather than a destination or activity in themselves.
As a culture (Anglo-Western), ad hoc gatherings and meetings have sort of died off. Everything is always planned ahead and booked in. It used to be common if you were passing through the neighbourhood to knock on your friend's door and pop in for a chat, but these days you'd probably be considered a bit odd if you did that, especially without ringing or texting ahead.
Maybe it's smartphones and being always connected. Maybe it's because people are time-poor and are unable to do this kind of thing any more. Maybe people don't like socialising with strangers any more. Maybe people are less social and would rather sit at home watching Netflix. It's probably all of the above.
> Maybe it's smartphones and being always connected.
I guess the smartphones (and the instant gratification) has filled up the hole that otherwise involved social interactions in the neighbour-hood. For instance, neighbours in my parent's village knew everyone at a very personal level. They had tea together pretty much every evening. I can't the say the same, in fact, I don't even know half their names.
Before COVID happened, I was actually in the process of starting a new sort of meet-up site, aimed at solving this problem. My initial thought was to have an online discussion board but have mandatory monthly meet-ups in cities around the world. For example, in order to be a member of the site, you have to physically come to a meet-up once every six months. Often enough to become a part of the community, but not too much to feel like a burden.
The core idea is to take the best of the Internet discussion format and combine it with the strengths of an in-person community.
I’m certainly open to any suggestions or thoughts on the idea.
There's a lovely thing that used to happen on Thursdays on r/sanfrancisco[1] - a fellow by the name u/jimmyjah would set up a spot at a bar and post on Reddit offering to buy any newcomers their first drink. It lead to a really lovely little community of stranger-Redditors hanging out weekly.
I think with openness, consistency, and just a tiny little push (a free drink), you can build a marvelous community.
This sounds pretty clever, I have definitely never thought of this before, but I dig the idea a lot.
I genuinely hope the COVID situation isn't putting a nail on the coffin of implementation of this idea for you, and you will attempt it again once everything is back to normal.
I think better sound isolation might help, in most modern establishment the background noise makes it impossible to have calm conversations. This article seems relevant enough, given that it starts out in a coffeeshop: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r...
But were cafe patrons of old quietly conversing with their table mates? Or was overheard conversation and speech-making part of the environment that brought fear to the minds of rulers?
I think it would be _easier_, not harder, to overhear conversations if acoustics were better. Turn off the background music, use materials that keep piercing cutlery noises to a minimum, that sort of thing.
Here it is: exclusivity. That’s what it is going to take in the new world of 2020. It could be as simple as an app that you schedule cafe time for with participating small cafes by yourself or for your friends, so that the table is waiting and ready for you. You can add all sorts of perks, from music control or silence for your block of time, to being able to choose the types of patrons that join you and your friends. Perhaps you are all musicians and you want to schedule a block of time with other musicians. The app would match you together and book the time.
It hasn't gone, just look for cafes that maintain this vibe. They are out there.
The key is that they are a commercial coffee house last of all, in direct opposition of the business strategies of most high end gentrified cafes. The priority is the place as a gathering or event space for the local neighborhood or community. Look for board games in shelves, look for open mic events, look for booze on the menu, look for american spirit or clove cig butts in the ash tray outside. These are the telltale signs.
And video games, and Netflix, and cheap travel, and Kindles, and CrossFit, and hackathons...
People went to cafes in part because of the lack of options. We have multiple huge industries in the modern world designed around making extremely appealing content for every possible interest. All driven by real-time analytics created by some of the best minds in applied statistics, game theory, and psychology. In order to give people free time, you'd need to eliminate the things that are currently filling our time.
Not sure if it'll come back... I mean, if I didn't have places like hackernews or reddit, couldn't chat with friends on whatsapp, couldn't read the news online etc, then actually going out to meet new people would be the best source of insights and information. It's just not necessary anymore.
The virus isn't a good example. All you can do with your time really is spend time on the internet or wander your neighborhood awkwardly shifting past people for the 100th time. I think we might have a whiplash when this is done, where people start engaging with public space at a higher rate than before the pandemic. Imagine everyone itching to just go to a bar, or a beach, or a trail, or a movie theater, or a cafe, or anything. I can see stuff being packed for months.
> All you can do with your time really is spend time on the internet or wander your neighborhood
No. You can draw, write, read, build things, etc. It just requires people getting creative, which is something we've getting less acustomed to as we instead consume more and more.
I don't disagree, but it's hard to point to the current mandated social distancing as empirical evidence. It's not like the people increasing their internet consumption could hang out at a cafe instead.
True, but there are other alternatives: You can draw, write, read, build things, etc. It just requires people getting creative, which is something we've getting less acustomed to as we instead consume more and more.
> Revolutions were plotted, art movements invented, and history made in places like Cafe Central in Vienna.
What makes you think people aren't doing this on their laptops? The person you think is doing corporate work on their MacBook could be changing the world.
The culture simply isn’t there anymore in any focused form. Reddit, HN or wherever probably isn’t comparable to having an entire empire’s brightest minds in the same cafe on a daily basis.
I think that's mostly because today there are so many bright minds they don't fit in a coffee house.
Go to the cafeteria of any large business or university and you'll probably find more highly educated people than you found in all of Vienna 150 years ago.
I think what you're yearning for is really the bourgeois culture of high-minded intellectuals participating in exclusive clubs rather than facilitating good discourse between intelligent people. Access to the latter nowadays is thankfully much easier than it was in the past.
I suspect that some of the posters in this thread are looking for a physical place to collaborate and share ideas, rather than just a bunch of bright minds in one venue.
>Go to the cafeteria of any large business or university and you'll probably find more highly educated people than you found in all of Vienna 150 years ago.
Highly ecudated != bright mind
I think it is because nowadays you can communicate with other bright minds instantly, as long as you can find them in the mazes of the internet.
Back then you had to be physically with them in the same space. Today you don't have that physical limitation.
But to be honest, due to sheer curiosity - i would love to try such coffee house, but unless we discover a time machine i doubt it will ever happen.
> Go to the cafeteria of any large business or university and you'll probably find more highly educated people than you found in all of Vienna 150 years ago.
Maybe, but those people aren’t really interacting with each other or sharing ideas in a way that isn’t aligned with their personal or professional goals. The cafe of yore was a melting pot of people and ideas; the contemporary cafeteria is far more functional and teleological.
Maybe it was my fault by using the term ‘brightest minds’, but intelligence or education level is also not really the main draw. Certainly the revolutionary artists of the late 1800s weren’t the most academically educated ones.
There's a fallacy here. The only bright minds permitted in the imperial cafe of yore were those of the right ethnicity, of the right social class, of the right parents who could afford to spend time in cafes talking about literature instead of laboring for wages. Think of all the bright minds that could have been, but never even had an opportunity for education and never learned to read, for example.
You say its the entire empires brightest minds in that cafe, I see an echo chamber composed of a small subset of whoever was the socially favorable class of people of the day, regurgitating the same already accepted ideas, failing to innovate for fear of being ostracized by each other in a world where high school level petty politics decided whether or not you kept your head attached to your body.
Even a parisian cafe with a drunken hemingway pales in comparison to a ted talk, in terms of sharing and improving ideas and introducing them to anyone in the world with an internet connection. Not just who could get into a parisian cafe.
Your comment is wrong and historically anachronistic in a number a ways. I don’t really have the patience to go through it point by point, but I’ll say this:
The idea that cafes were locked off to certain people because of lack of wealth or not being the proper social class is demonstrably false. Plenty of places catered specifically for avant-garde artists, obscure literary movements, and other things not deemed proper by the upper classes. Plenty of other cafes were focused more on workers, especially in somewhere like Paris. It was a part of everyday life.
> ...they also used the cafe’s writing paper, but apparently many of them did not bother to order anything.
> Between the two world wars, in 1925, there were over 1,250 coffee-houses in Vienna...There were special coffee-houses for pianists and others for string-players, for operetta composers and for serious composers, for stamp collectors and court councilors, for radicals and conservatives. Almost each self-respecting soccer club had its coffee-house, and almost each unrespected ministry.
> And there was a generous assortment of ‘Viennese Schopenhauer’s’, such as the Hungerkünstler (Hunger Artist) Ottfried Krzyzanowsky who could go without solid food for days, and was nourished by the stale coffee-house air. He became a local legend but never wrote a line.
This hunger artist later died of starvation. Many cafes were filled with poor artists. If you read Hemingway, you quickly learn that he was quite poor while living in Paris and had to strategically plan his meals.
I recommend the anthology book On Bohemia by Graña, specifically the essay The Viennese Kaffeehaus by Joseph Wechsberg. (Quotes are from the latter.)
Imagine Osama Bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Satoshi Nakamoto, Putin, Xi Jinping, Jeff Bezos, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk and Geoff Hinton sitting in the same cafe in the early 2000s.
I recall thinking exactly this at the time of the Bush administration. Those two were both all about ordering violence from afar. Get them in a room together and what are they gonna do? I thought maybe they'd not be such tough guys after all. Maybe a controversial opinion...
I wonder how you would be perceived in that cafe in vienna if you looked neither austrian nor hungarian? The proportion of who even got their hands on literature in the first place was tiny. The majority of Vienna's brightest minds over the course of history likely died forgotten and illiterate, never having an opportunity to turn their intelligence into action and progress.
The 1800s and first half of the 1900s were extremely toxic environments for sharing ideas, driven by massively inflated egos of a few people cornering their fields who wanted to hoard their theories and ideas for themselves, while also being at the ready to shoot down any dissenting opinion from someone in the same field who could have been a collaborator in saner times. Even Darwin suffered so much toxic abuse from his peers that he walked back a lot of his master work by his death.
We harp that people use the internet to waste their time, but that is such a privileged and myopic stance to blame societies shortcomings on the rising internet. Misinformation and propaganda weren't invented by mark zuckerberg.
We fixate on the bad and ignore the benefits to people in different situations than ours. So many more people around the world have access to knowledge that would have otherwise been impossible to ever receive, simply because they came out of the wrong womb on top of the wrong speck of dirt.
> the current iteration of cafes is but a pale imitation of what they were in the past.
>Revolutions were plotted, art movements invented, and history made in places like Cafe Central in Vienna.
That was simply out of necessity. Revolutions are plotted, art movements invented, and history is made on the internet now. If these things are your metric, cafe's will never again return to the glory days.
For some reason Salt Lake City has (or had? I haven't been there in ~8 years) a fantastic cafe culture. Lots of art and culture centered around places like 9th and 9th and Greenhouse Effect (before the current dickhead owner bought it). Last I saw though, places like The Rose Establishment are doing their best to squash the culture and bring in SF coffee culture, meaning pretentious drinks, rude waitstaff, and a sea of dudes at their own tables with laptops covered in <company they work for> stickers.
This is still (well, pre-COVID) pretty true! Coffee Garden and Publik at 9th and 9th are great places to hang out and chat and I'd feel weird pulling a laptop out. And there are lots of new arrivals, most of which feel more like community gathering spaces than workspaces. I love the cafe culture here and I miss it when I'm in norcal.
Australia's Cafe culture is the closest I know of to this. Not only is American coffee gross, but the takeaway in-and-out culture is not what cafes used to be.
In Australia, there are thousands of cafes where you can buy quality coffee, have free WiFi, aesthetic seating area, lounges, music you can still hear yourself think over, usually has pretty good food too. Now sure, you're paying $4 for a coffee, but the environment is like no other in the world. Even the coffee is fairly unique in terms of quality and style compared to American and continental European (french, even Italian).
The earliest coffeehouses I was exposed to growing up in SV were in bookstores and became great gathering places, especially after dinner.
The Upstart Crow (bookstore and cafe) was in the Pruneyard shopping center in the 1980s. I had my first espresso drinks there. In 1990 or so, Coffee Society opened in Cupertino, just a few doors down from A Clean, Well Lighted Place for books.
I resent your comment as low effort. This is a rather non-nuanced take on history. What happened, happened. History does not really work like that.
To make it concrete - my great great grandma was born in shtetl, in the pale. She was illiterate, and her village was pogromed often. The revolution allowed her daughter to get some education, and her granddaughter to become a leading civil engineer. For this I am grateful. That being said, I also understand the futile impossibility of even attempting to "what if" history.
Café Central is probably historically most important cafe. It seems like everybody was there at some point. The list of regulars and visitors is who is who of the 20th century.
For the short period (20 years or so) in the early 1900s Vienna was where the history happened and modern ideas were born. Then everybody scattered around the world and executed those ideas with varying results. Philosophy, math, psychology, physics, economics, politics (left and right) you name it.
In 1913 Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin lived within the same square kilometer.
And this is why it'll never come back. Governments will push for social distancing to be permanent (to 'protect' us from future pandemics), they'll hold on to all the power they amass during the pandemic, they'll keep tracking people and do everything they can to prevent social change which threatens their power.
Coffee, and its associated caffeine effects, has an interesting history in the battle theater. These comments regarding coffee are from the American Civil War:
"Perhaps the North's access to caffeine gave its soldiers a strategic advantage. At least that's what one Union officer, Gen. Benjamin Butler, thought. He ordered his men to carry coffee in their canteens and planned attacks based on when his men would be most wired. His advice to other generals was: 'If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold.'" [1]
"In 1859 Sharps Rifle Co. began to manufacture a carbine with a hand-cranked grinder built into the butt stock — or handle — of the rifle. Union soldiers would fill the stock with beans, grind them up, dump them out and use the grounds to cook the coffee. As the morning began, one Civil War diarist described a scene of 'little campfires rapidly increasing to hundreds in numbers that would shoot up along the hills and plains.' The encampment would buzz with the sound of thousands of grinders simultaneously crushing beans. Soon, tens of thousands of muckets (coffee pots) gurgled with fresh brew." [2]
Same is true of amphetamines. US Fighter pilots were taking them as recently as 2002. I heard an interesting story about Elvis on NPR. He took two things from his time in the military: Karate, which colored his dance moves, and drugs. He got fat after coming back from the military, after he stopped the amphetamines.
Peeked the modafinil wikipedia and found this interesting quote:
"Monkeys will self-administer modafinil if they have previously been trained to self-administer cocaine.[28] As such, modafinil is classified by the United States FDA as a schedule IV controlled substance, a category for drugs with valid medical uses and low but significant addiction potential.[1][29]"
Never new it was a monkey that determined US drug policy, but I guess I'm not surprised!
Without looking into the pharmacology of modafinil, this is a baseless comment. Seriously, look at the pharmacology of modafinil[1] and compare it to methylphenidate[2]. Modafinil may have some dopamine reuptake inhibition, but its affect on histamine receptors counters a lot of the hedonistic response that comes with methylphenidate.
Speaking as someone with a modafinil prescription and that has taken Vyvanse, the experience is extremely different. I don't feel an urge to take more modafinil, and I don't feel extreme fatigue when taking a break from it. I'm taking a break from it now in fact.
First time amphetamines were used was by Nazi troops in WWII. The show I was watching that mentioned it was invented in Germany and used for the push into France by the Nazis also mentioned an interesting side effect of it also reducing empathy.
Amphetamine was discovered in Germany in the late 19th century, but no one knew it was a stimulant until the 1930s. And both Allies and Axis used it in WWII as a combat stim.
Very disappointed that the article doesn't mention that about 1734 Johann Sebastian Bach actually wrote a secular cantata (often called the "Coffee Cantata") telling the story of a father trying to get his daughter to stop drinking coffee.
I came here to post about that, and you beat me to it. I was provoked by the article's title, "coffee...a modern necessity." Unless of course you consider Bach modern!
Coffee has a good number of health benefits - plenty of antioxidants and its good for your liver. Naturally, overuse can be bad for you because of its dehydrating effects. I've had conversations with some people who mention they're on their 4th or 5th cup a day, and I've said that I found that 1 or 2 cups a day coupled with plenty of water are much more effective.
Just like anything, a little bit can be good for you, but don't take too much - and stay hydrated! Preferably with plenty of sleep but I understand thats not always realistic for some.
> Though the caffeine in coffee may have a diuretic effect, it’s unlikely to dehydrate you.
> For caffeine to have a significant diuretic effect, studies show that you need to consume more than 500 mg per day — or the equivalent of 5 cups (40 ounces or 1.2 liters) of brewed coffee (12, 13, 14).
> A study in 10 casual coffee drinkers reviewed the impact of drinking 6.8 ounces (200 ml) of water, lower caffeine coffee (269 mg of caffeine), and high caffeine coffee (537 mg of caffeine) on signs of dehydration.
> Researchers observed that drinking the higher caffeine coffee had a short-term diuretic effect, whereas the lower caffeine coffee and water were both hydrating (15).
> In addition, other studies show that moderate coffee intake is as hydrating as drinking water (16).
> For example, a study in 50 heavy coffee drinkers noted that drinking 26.5 ounces (800 ml) of coffee daily for 3 days was equally as hydrating as drinking the same amount of water (16).
> Also, an analysis of 16 studies discovered that taking 300 mg of caffeine in a single sitting — equivalent to 3 cups (710 ml) of brewed coffee — increased urine production by only 3.7 ounces (109 ml), compared with drinking the same amount of non-caffeinated beverages (17).
> So, even when coffee makes you urinate more, it shouldn’t dehydrate you — as you don’t lose as much fluid as you originally drank.
It might be unexpected because if you’re like me, you feel super dehydrated after a cup of coffee. It might not actually dehydrate me but I feel like it does. And water makes it feel better.
During a college lecture I had what my friend described as a short seizure, for me I definitely felt like I was passing out and I had visions. I carefully walked to the campus hospital and the doctor I met with put forth his best guess that my excessive caffeine consumption had irritated the Vagus nerve causing me to pass out. So that's something to be wary of, oh and the withdrawal headache you'll get on Sunday if you forget you have a pretty hard weekday coffee habit.
After I overcame my coffee addiction I switched to caffeine pills since I still needed stimulants to be productive. Some of the benefits I've experienced taking the same dose in pill form over a cup of coffee are cleaner teeth, fresher breath, no longer having to waste time making or drinking coffee (what started as an act of love turned into a chore then a latent hate toward my grinder and espresso machine), but best of all, no more awful coffee poops disrupting my day.
I always keep a few in my pocket in case I start dosing off in meetings. A few live in the car to deal with drowsiness while driving, which was the issue that kick started my caffeine addiction when I was 15 and learning to drive. Nothing seems to put me asleep quite like driving on the freeway :(
>best of all, no more awful coffee poops disrupting my day
I don't know man, I really like the coffee poop breaks.
Having to get up the chair every now and then and take my mind off work for a couple of minutes in silence followed by the sweet post poop satisfaction.
> About a hundred sixty years after Dr. Salter’s book was published, a review of studies was performed to see if coffee had any true impact on lung function and asthma. The authors wrote:
> “Caffeine is found in coffee, tea, cola drinks and cocoa. Caffeine is a drug that is very similar to theophylline. Theophylline is a bronchodilator drug that is taken to open up the airways in the lungs and therefore relieve the symptoms of asthma, such as wheezing, coughing and breathlessness. Scientists are interested in finding out whether caffeine has the same effect on the lungs as theophylline.”2
> And they concluded:
> “This review found that even small amounts of caffeine can improve lung function for up to four hours.”2
> Caffeine is a methylxanthine. It falls into the same family of medicine as theophylline, a strong bronchodilator that was a top-line asthma remedy during the 1970’s through the 1990’s. I was chronically dependent on theophylline from the mid 1970’s until 2007.
> The vet examines Kristy, but doesn't have anything she can prescribe for a human. Sam has an idea, and fills up Kristy's bottle with coffee, telling Bunny that the caffeine will help Kristy to breathe until they can get her some proper medicine.
I am so glad I never got on the coffee bandwagon. I once surreptitiously added up how much my coworkers spent on coffee during a typical work week (not even including what they might have spent at home). Crazy (to me) amounts of money.
Buying a grinder, French press and bags of beans is not very expensive. Maybe $0.25 a cup depending on the quality of beans you get, plus an initial investment of ~$50 for equipment.
Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
> Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
The price per ounce of coffee on those drinks has got to be astronomical!
I didn't drink coffee when I first moved to New Mexico, but after trying to local piñon coffee I'm a convert--luckily, I can get a 5 lb bag of the beans at Costco for about $30!
I managed to get myself hooked on some of our local small-batch roasters. I've specifically been buying Trifecta beans lately, and while the price of $10-15/lb isn't too bad, the need to purchase pastries and one of their unique espresso drinks every time I stop by for a pound of beans certainly isn't doing my wallet any favors.
I've been debating picking up some Piñon from Costco sometime soon to save a few bucks, but have a question about that - do you find that whatever they add to the beans can gum up your grinder?
Where does one find good dark roast beans? The on-line descriptions of flavor are not very helpful. I guess what I need is a sampler: a few ounces each of a bunch of beans. Alternatively, I'll listen to advice on good dark roast beans.
Not knowing the coffee culture of your particular locale, I’ll just offer some generic suggestions:
* Try out a few local coffee shops - and I mean local artisan coffee shops, that sell hipster shit like pour-overs and espresso con pano. They tend to actually care about what they sell, rather than some other coffee shops that just sell diner-style coffee and pastries for people to grab on the way to work.
* Get to know the baristas/roaster(s)/owner(s), and try out their different coffee options. I know of several local places that offer (at least) dark and light roast drip coffee options, sometimes with several different pour-over options (my current favorite probably offers about a dozen different bean options, give or take).
* See if they sell beans or can point you in the direction of where they buy beans.
As far as I know, oily beans are what you want for a good, full-city (very dark) roast. The article you linked is definitely an opinion piece - I’ve never met a roaster who didn’t think a dark roast, or at least a very dark roast, should be roasted to “first crack”, though most are opposed to “second crack” (what Starbucks does, and it’s essentially burning the beans).
Having worked at a few cafes in my day, you’d be amazed at the profit margins on coffee. It costs pennies for the typical cafe to sell a cup of black coffee at ~$2.50.
The margins are good, but from my experience (which was a long time ago tbf), a lot more profit came from food. A small cafe isn’t doing badly to sell 200-300 coffees a day. Even if you’re selling 300 at $4, that’s only $1200 in revenue. Margins on food aren’t as good, but you’d be hoping to make 3x-4x revenue on food compared to coffee. Keeping in mind that a even a small cafe would likely be running at least a couple grand in expenses per day (with the biggest being rent and payroll).
Exactly, every hobby or indulgence has extremes. I'm happy with my ~$200 in coffee equipment and $5-10/lb coffee. But, plenty of other people spend thousands on equipment and buy $20-30+/lb coffee.
All things considered, coffee is a fairly cheap hobby. At the extreme end you’ve got espresso machines and personal roasters, of course, but for the average coffee connoisseur, excellent equipment is attainable for a few hundred dollars.
>but for the average coffee connoisseur, excellent equipment is attainable for a few hundred dollars.
I think this is generally true of most hobbies (jokingly it's what I use to define a hobby, something that you can, but don't have spend at least 1000 USD on).
To pick one I recently started on you can get started brewing beer for under 100 dollars. You can get perfectly acceptable, even excellent beer using basic equipment. Then, if you want you can go out and spend thousands of dollars on pressure transfer equipment, kegging tools, stainless steel fermenters and etc.
> Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
That's only a fashion statement, which, like all other fashion statements, don't go for any quality or smart/educated choice but pure social signaling.
Nobody with any functional taste buds in places like Italy goes to Starbucks. Only those desperately lost and having herd mentality, similar to folks in France eating in McDonald (and there are tons of those).
/rant
Btw if kitchen hob is available, I consider Italian press (aka Moka pot) superior to French press, and more efficient in extracting flavors and potency (so also more economical in long run). Prices tend to be similar.
I'm a coffee drinker who manages to get away spending almost no money on it because coffee's free at work and I'm not picky about the taste (I don't mind instant). :) (it's coffee connoisseurs who spend a lot)
I used to be a non-coffee drinker-- and I applaud coffee-teetotalers--but in my 2nd year of grad school I discovered that a small dose of coffee (1/2 cup) made so much more productive. Because I dosed it according to my body weight, I was able to get the benefits of coffee without its downsides. There were higher order benefits too. My moods improved because I felt productive, which helped me progress academically, and it all became a virtuous cycle.
My rule today is: drink coffee, but not too much, free is better.
I agree on the free coffee front. I find coffee is one of those few products where quality mostly decreases with price. The other case of this--very similar--is generic medicine, where expired patents mean nobody is making a buck on a huge sales show to promote a crappy medicine, so you get better results if you select the cheapest alternative.
I'm using a french press with hand-grinder and the beans are roughly $30/month max. In terms of enjoyment maybe the highest ROI of the money I'm spending.
If you brew it yourself, coffee is cheap. Too cheap in fact, as it is fueled by exploitation.
I have an espresso machine and grinder at home, about 1000€ worth. My everyday coffee is at ~15€ per kg, I dose 14g per cup (espresso double), and drink about 4 cups a day, about 1€ per day. Let's amortize the equipment for 5 years, add a bit for electricity, water, cleaning supplies, ... That's 2 € per day, for maybe Starbucks-level coffee.
For 3-4€ per day, you can buy gourmet coffee and a high end grinder and machine. The result will be better than in 99% of coffee shops.
If you just want caffeine, you can buy cheap coffee for half the price, and spend 10x less on equipment bringing the price down to less than 1 € per day.
Sure, it adds up, but is is far from crazy. On par with drinking store-bought soda or fancy water, and definitely cheaper than smoking.
I think it's hilarious that you say you're happy you are, but all the replies are telling you how you could get addicted to their drug of choice. Just let irrational be, everybody!
That's not the claim GP made. They said their coworkers spent an amount of money that seemed crazy to the GP. There's nothing to refute! Repliers don't know the coworkers. They can't refute GP's personal metrics. And we already know that some people don't think spending money on coffee is ok, because GP's co-workers are doing it every week.
Of course there is something to refute - with the provided info we can only assume that GP is referring to the co-workers spending 3-5 dollars per coffee at a coffee shop. The replies are providing an alternative to this method of consumption.
So? The GP is still allowed to think it's crazy that those people spend that amount of money. The GP is surely aware, like everyone is, that you can make food for less than you can buy premade stuff for. As are the people buying coffee at the coffee shop, who will go on spending it no matter how many people reply to his comment.
So unless people are trying to get the GP to join in their addiction (but cheaper!), there's no point in telling him all this. Nothing is being refuted.
Unless you go for the really high-end stuff, it's a few cents a day to drink a couple of cups at home in the morning.
In a seller's market for labor, free coffee makes a useful pons asinorum for potential employers, whether or not you drink it at work. (I don't.) Even in overpriced packaging methods like K-cups, it's so inexpensive in bulk that a company that cheaps out there will cheap out on more important things too. Similarly, because caffeine is a performance-enhancing drug for cognitive workers, one may reasonably question the good sense of leadership which refuses to provide it free of charge.
Used here in a more metaphorical sense, for sure. There are more precise idioms for what I intended to say, but they didn't come to mind in time, so I went with what I had.
I don't drink coffee at home. I don't make it at work. I will get it sometimes at work from the barista bar.
But when I am working from home, I will _always_ go to a coffee house to work. It is difficult to state how important that the "third place" is. I focus far better there than at home. Try it out. Even if you don't drink coffee. Get a nice peppermint tea or something.
Even if coffee shops aren't open, the advice still stands---you can (at least in the US) go out and work at a park or another outdoor spot without running into too many people.
There are various kinds of coffee. I'm using moka pot and I'm buying grinded coffee. Those are cheap enough, moka pot is around $50 and lasts few years (forever if you're careful), grinded coffee is something like $10 in my country and enough for a 2-3 weeks for me. I'm living in a third-world country but that's not my biggest spendings my a large margin. Preparing 4 cups of coffee takes around 3 minutes. That's enough for me to sustain for a half of day.
There are some people who are spending unhealthy amount of money, true, but they chose to do so. There are various options and if someone wants to spend 10x money to get 10% better taste (and even that is subjective), that's his choice, not something unavoidable.
It can be ultra cheap. Buy raw coffee beans in big bags. Their shelf life is years, and they are like a few bucks per kilogram.
Roasting at home doesn't require expensive equipment either. A manual grinder is like 20 bucks, same goes for the brewing thingy that you put on the stovetop.
Any suggestions for where to get green beans? Sweet Maria's has come up before in conversations with friends, but if there's some amazing source for them, I'd love to know!
Man, it is so much cheaper south of the border. Canadian green bean distributors seem to be quite a bit more expensive, even when factoring in the exchange rate.
Could you give a quick overview how one would roast at home? I tried baking green beans in the oven and "roasting" in a pan, both approaches went undrinkable.
We had a hand cranked one since forever in my family home. As a kid I always volunteered to grind the coffee for my parents. I don't remember it being particularly hard to crank but who knows - I indeed use an electric one nowadays.
It wasn't so much hard to crank, it just took forever to crank through all the beans for a serving. Maybe I set it too fine. 10 minutes of cranking vs 30 seconds on the electric grinder.
Now that I switched to caffeine pills I'm getting my two cups a day for 5 cents. I'm too drowsy otherwise. In fact the whole reason why I got into this mess of softcore stimulants was because I was falling asleep in class and behind the wheel of a car.
There's a comic titled The Four Vices, each pane the character is taking a day off from their vices. I guess my problem is now that I have had coffee I don't want off and I pretty fearful that I'd just find another vice instead to fill the void.
Funny, my coworker convinced our workplace to build and stock a coffee bar with an espresso machine by the exact same reasoning. Top of the line equipment and sending him to barista training still cost far less than we were all spending at our local shops each month.
$4-6 per run. They do a minimum of 3 runs a day. It cost them $12-18 a day in coffee. 5 days a week was $60-90 a week. Approximately $240-360 a month. That is a brand new car payment.
Buying coffee at coffee shops every day is for suckers. Buy your own beans, grind them at home, and brew. Costs pennies per cup - cheaper than alcohol. Water is the only drink that's cheaper.
1) very slight uncomfortableness (nothing severe) [~3 days]
2) more vivdness, alertness, euphoria, calmness [1 to 2 weeks]
3) weird chest / heart issues (nothing too severe but very unpleasant and first time was quite worrying) [2 to 3 weeks]
4) I'm feeling down, unmotivated, dull [starting at about week 4 or 5]
---
stage 4 is what I never survived so far. it's just taking too much of a toll. then again it's an up and down so I once managed to stop for 4 months. but it brings me to a pre-depressive state where I just don't see much point in working. otoh I very much enjoy just relaxing, chilling - if I can do that I'm happy. if not it's a chore - no productiveness at all. very slow mental processing.
---
I started drinking coffee during puberty. So, I guess my brain is not just chemically hooked on it but actually neurologically developed around it.
> I started drinking coffee during puberty. So, I guess my brain is not just chemically hooked on it but actually neurologically developed around it.
While I didn't pick up coffee until a little later, I started on caffeinated drinks (soda, tea) well before puberty. I've had this same thought—that I'm more than just habituated to it—but I haven't seen others making the same claim before. The last time I quit caffeine, I had standard withdrawal symptoms for a few days (as expected), then a week or two of catching up/rebalancing sleep, and then? I started routinely getting hit with what I can only describe as depressive episodes. It took a while to connect them with being off caffeine, but a little bit of (non-blind obviously) experimentation strongly suggested that they were due precisely to my brain-body chemistry being out of whack due to lack of caffeine. I resumed caffeine, of course. I never suffered from depression before nor since.
Anyway, so, I don't ever completely quit caffeine anymore.
That a substance could have such a hold on you that you have basically decided that you will never stop using it is... kinda scary. I mean, I get it and I’m certainly not going to tell you to stop, but it’s still kinda scary.
I second that. I'm convinced it's possible but it would require intelligent management of the symptoms and the environment. I think most people's motivation to work in an office is highly dependent on caffeine.
I often wonder whether quitting caffeine is just as difficult as quitting tobacco but a much more socially acceptable vice. Oddly enough I’ve yet to meet someone who has been hooked and then managed to quit both who can compare the experiences.
Through all my years of university I drank at least one cup of coffee every single day until the last year. And that last year I picked up vaping, ramping up to 50mg nicotine cartridges vaping in the morning and evening every day.
To summarize, I've quit coffee since August 2019 (not a single cup) and vaping since two months ago.
Surprisingly, both were not a huge issue to quit physiologically. Lack of caffeine resulted in a hazy brain feeling for the first week or so. No perceived physiological effects from nicotine withdrawal.
The real challenge is habits you form from these addictions. I still drink some kind of hot liquid in the mornings.
For vaping, I first threw out all my high nicotine liquids and continued to vape with something like a 5mg until it ran out. Due to the COVID lock-down, going out to purchase juice luckily takes effort.
It's still an on-going mental battle of recognizing when I'm feeling a nicotine craving and dealing with that feeling (ex. re-affirming why I quit, not getting angry with myself for craving but just moving on).
For anyone reading this: I definitely recommend quitting anything you are doing that you feel you are addicted to (that you can live without, or is harming you).
For me personally, the entire experience was kind of like starting a homework assignment/project. Just starting it feels dreadful but somehow when you finally take the plunge it's not too bad.
Not the case for everyone, but it might motivate you to go for it!
Chiming in. For me, caffeine withdrawl happens hours after not having coffee in the form of a splitting migrane. With nicotine, it was the exact same splitting migrane, only it started a half hour after the last dose. Both migranes lasted constantly for about a week, felt like I couldn't think, but afterwards I was no longer physically addicted.
"On the contrary" I stated. "People who drink coffee are insane. Insane and possessed and, what is worse, willing to be possessed. Most people in asylums drink coffee. If you let them stop drinking it, they would regain enough equanimity to leave. But, no, they don't stop. In fact, they drink more and more, and they get crazier and crazier. They're dehumanized with every single goddamned drop, and although they sense it, they're like lemmings, or buffalo who jump off cliffs. People drink coffee and it makes them insane.
"Must you drink coffee? Why not cocoa, tea, cola tea, mate, yoco infusion, or guarana? Why caffeine? Why not theobromine or theophylline? I have had an occasional square of chocolate. It is the cause of uncontrolled ecstasy, but, afterward, you sink into Promethean despair.
"Note," I demanded, "that caffeine was introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century, post-Renaissance. Why is it, do you think, that the art of the Renaissance and the classical period has never been surpassed? The great heights were reached on angels' wings, not via a filthy corruption brewed from a bean that poisons its own tree."
as for serving coffee to children, my son can have some when he is able to go a minute without excitedly trying to kill himself in a new and innovative way - so about when he is 30.
on edit: added a closing quotation mark I forgot before, haven't had my morning cup yet.
>Renaissance and the classical period has never been surpassed? The great heights were reached on angels' wings, not via a filthy corruption brewed from a bean that poisons its own tree.
People drink coffee to cope with fatique, Also i thought reinassance was about not using same Christian beliefs, thus named Renaissance. Anyways Caffeine isn't as bad as the article says
My dad grew up in the 60s and went from the milk bottle to the coke bottle. My parents were more strict with me on soda, but most of my friends had free reign on the beverage and were not drinking water at all. We all turned out fine, minus a few teeth.
I would think growing up drinking a bottle of sugar water and the habits it causes would have something to do with the overweight, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension statistics all over the world.
Tea/coffee is quite common here in India, for me it was (and still is) part of morning breakfast. Even for 2-3 year old kids. At my home, tea is prepared at least thrice a day. I tried quitting, but didn't try too hard because of headaches. I've managed to bring it down to once per day since last few years, unless it is too cold a day and I succumb to a second cup in the evening. Fortunately, I never liked the taste carbonated soft drinks.
I don't drink coffee for caffeine. I like the flavor, and enjoy the process behind brewing and experimenting with different parameters to make a cup that tastes better or worse or simply different. I like going to coffeeshops just because. It's a hobby for me. And although I drink two cups of coffee almost every day, I don't feel any kind of withdrawal when I stop drinking it. The caffeine just happens to be a nice benefit.
You could pretty much replace the word coffee/caffeine with similar words for beer, alcohol, crack, heroin, ....
Addiction does not feel like an addiction. That's the problem with addiction.
Said that, some addiction is be life-enriching, from the impact on mind, body and social. (I love my coffee, I am so addicted to it that I stop drinking it for 2 months a year.)
I feel like the article didn't really answer that question. Also, given that some of the most successful people I know don't drink coffeine at all, I wonder if the assumption is even correct.
Good read. Kellogg and Post might have been right about coffee causing 'enervation'. Afternoon coffee breaks can lower sleep quality in some people which leads to long term reduction in energy due to low grade sleep deprivation.
Yeah, people go into withdrawal during the night which leads to bad quality sleep which leads to the desire to drink coffee earlier in the day, since you feel very unwell after you wake up. A downward spiral.
I drink up to 4 cups a day or zero per day. I might be a daily drinker for 2 months and then go a month or two without a cup or any caffeine source at all. I've never had a problem with caffeine withdrawal headache which is interesting. 23andme says I'm 'likely to slightly more coffee than average' and I am a slow caffeine metabolizer based on my genetics.
The only coffee rules I really follow are 1) don't drink it if I'm tired - for whatever reason I feel nauseous if I drink it when I am actually tired, and 2) don't drink any after 3PM or else I probably won't go to sleep until 1-2AM.
I never developed a taste for coffee, and decided early on that there was no reason to try to do so. (I'm in my late 30s now.) I do have the occasional coke, which I'd never noticed any effect from until the past few years. A single can of coke later than early afternoon now will have a noticeable impact on my sleep that night—get sleepy later, and end up sleeping around 0.5-1 hours less than I would otherwise. (With the expected resulting tiredness the next day.) Of course I expect much of that is due to lack of tolerance since I so rarely have caffeine.
Coffee has to be forced imo. No one likes coffee from the getgo, and if they tell you they do they really just like sugar and warm milk. It takes a while to overcome the bitterness and notice the taste, kinda like hard liquor. The whole reason why I forced myself to start drinking it was to not fall asleep driving to high school. I worked closing shift so sleep was sparse.
I just cut back to zero caffeine as of a week ago. It was hell, but I finally hit break-even today. It became obvious the coffee consumption was impacting productivity and sleep quality so I had to hit the reset button.
Just had my first "normal" day and it was far more productive than any other day in 2020. I will try to stay off the coffee indefinitely.
For a lot of people, the negative sleep impacts overshadow any improvement in productivity as a result of the caffeine. If you've been drinking it for a while, the withdrawal could take multiple months, so you might not be able to tell what your decaffeinated brain feels like until you've been off it for a long time.
My consumption has gone down to one dose in the morning since the pandemic, but before when I still had a life it was far higher.
You can set your clock to my comedown. Usually I'll need another dose at lunch, especially if I'm to be engaging with other people. If I'm doing something after work I'll need another dose at four, then however late the day runs I'll be needing to take a caffeine pill every four hours or else I'll enter a pretty thick mental fog or start sleeping sitting upright.
That mental fog and falling asleep still happens since I'm not taking the afternoon pills, I've just been leaning into napping like a toddler while working from home. Sometimes I'll doze off with a line half written in terminal, wake up and just go right back to typing the rest of the command.
We would need to define a cup. I have a little pot that I use a #2 filter on to brew. It says it's 4 cups, but really fills my coffee cup twice. I drink 1 pot a day.
My wife hates coffee, but my ritual of bean grinding, water boiling and pouring with all the associated smells has also become part of her mourning routine.
I'm drinking one cup every 1-2 hours. But my coffee is not usual, it's a very hard coffee from moka pot mixed with fresh milk in proportion 1:9, so it's not a lot of coffee actually, but rather a lot of milk. I'm really addicted to the taste of this beverage and caffeine makes me feel a little bit better.
Setting aside the workplace- where I drink coffee for enjoyment and could function without it- I have discovered that a dose of caffeine makes a tremendous difference when I go running at 6AM. (Roll out of bed at 5:50) I go from feeling like I can't make it a half mile, to feeling like the world is happy & beautiful, as the caffeine kicks in. It's been quite stark once I realized what was going on.
Ah, just today I had a caffeine withdrawal induced headache, because I had been drinking tea the last three days. It was so bad I had to pop a Thomapyrin tablet with a Coke. For all non-Germans: it's a fixed combination drug that includes Aspirin (250mg), Paracetamol (200mg) and Caffeine (50mg).
I love coffee, brings me joy every morning. Feel it's worth it for me.
That said, I drink specialty coffee only, have my own espresso machine, use only high quality freshly roasted beans, etc.
I also don't drink more than 2 cups a day, and rarely drink coffee after noon. Sometimes I do a 3rd one later in the day, but will often go decaf for it.
With the principal cost of the espresso machine and equipment, the maintainance cost, the price of grass fed whole milk and top quality beans, it comes to about 1$ per cup for me. Since I have 1 to 2 cups a day, that averages around 600$ a year I spend on coffee. Which for the pleasure I get from it is well well worth the price in my opinion.
I was forced to start drinking coffee. I had to drive myself to high school at 7am, didn't get much sleep with extracurriculars and homework and work. Eventually it got too dangerous to drive in the morning being that drowsy so I had to start consuming massive amounts of caffeine. The withdraw symptoms were in some ways worse than nicotine imo.
I quit coffee almost a year ago and can never see myself going back. I basically have noticed improvements on all the dimensions that people typically drink coffee to "solve."
Some of the effects I have noticed:
- Less anxiety throughout the day.
- Fewer "highs" and "lows" throughout the day. My energy level is pretty constant.
- Easier to wake up. I rarely snooze my alarm more than once.
- Easier to focus. My level of focus (over time) is more consistent.
- Better hydration. This means less headaches, etc.
- More energy. I generally have the energy I need to do what I want basically up until I go to sleep.
- I can burn sleep. It's very easy for me now to go 2-3 days with very limited sleep, and then sleep 12 hours to recover.
- Coffee "works." The one or two times I needed coffee, it actually worked to keep me awake and energized.
The reason for this is pretty obvious. Coffee stresses your adrenals and sends your body an "awake" signal. Caffeine's half life is 6 hours, which means even if you have it "before noon" you'll still have a substantial amount in your system while you sleep. This impacts sleep quality, which means you are accumulating micro amounts of sleep debt every night which you never pay off. Eventually, you struggle to get up in the mornings until you have had some coffee in your system. The "I can't function without coffee" effect. This is a pretty much ubiquitous 21st century experience, as far as I can tell.
Furthermore, coffee impacts your body's natural processes that it uses to wake up. Your body produces cortisol in order to wake up in the morning, which is a "stress" hormone, which is also induced by drinking coffee (which overall impacts the endocrine system). Hacking this system to overproduce hormones everyday isn't great for when your body actually needs this system to wake you up.
For people considering quitting coffee I have the following advice:
- You will get a headache 24-36 hours after you quit. Take ibuprofen. (By the way, this should give you a hint to how long coffee actually meaningfully stays in your system.)
- You will feel weird for probably 2 weeks.
- You will have coffee cravings. (I found these hit when I was tired. I felt like I needed to drink coffee to fix my tiredness. I tried to replace this impulse with drinking water or herbal tea a lot of tiredness is caused by dehydration.)
- You will be tired sometimes. You'll just have to deal with that, but it's really not that bad of a sensation, and the solution: sleep :)
People often think cutting coffee out is "impossible" but many people also haven't gone a day or two without drinking coffee since they were 18, so, I would say it's worth a try at least.
I quit recently, and had all of the withdrawal, and positive experiences that you mention.
I got the 24 hour headache and it was horrific. But more importantly I have been getting a headache, once a week at least, for years. I haven’t had a single headache in the two months since I quit coffee. This is remarkable!
The craziest part is waking up and going to sleep are like switches now. On:off. So crisp.
One thing I had to relearn was how to drink enough water to stay hydrated. As I was drinking a lot of my daily water in my tea and coffee cups.
for those that have an issue consuming coffee e.g headaches, stomach issues. my non-medical advice based on personal experiences is: try lighter to medium roasts. course grounds - french press | traditional brews. 100% arabica beans. flush with water i.e after a cup of coffee drink two - 4 cups of water. also mixing decaf n caffeinated coffee
My understanding is that lighter roasts can actually have more caffeine than dark roasts because the roasting process gradually removes caffeine from the beans. That’s from George Howell who is kind of a coffee legend here in the US north east. Haven’t tested this myself.
Most people don't like coffee, they like caffeine, it's an addiction. To me, coffee smells bad, tastes ok, and leaves my mouth feeling dirty after drinking it. I just don't see the point in coffee, especially with all the disposable containers from Starbucks and the like that go straight to the trash every day.
I'll concede it's likely that most people drink coffee for the caffeine, but I would venture a guess that most people don't drink very good or well-brewed coffee. It doesn't really make sense to say that "coffee" in general smells or tastes bad because the range is enormous; it's similar to lumping all citrus fruits together.
I've had a hard time lately restricting my coffee intake to reasonable levels because I've had a lot of time to practice coffee brewing and some of the batches I've managed to brew have felt like drinking liquid chocolate. Even the same coffee beans will taste completely different depending on how you brew it.
I don't regret it at all though. Coffee is a luxury where a small investment goes a long way.
I’ve heard of caffeine withdrawal. I didn’t think it was real. Or I thought I could handle it.
But if caffeine withdrawal, was what I got, then it is very real.
After I ran out of coffee, on day 1, I had a slight headache. On day 2, I had a very intensive headache, as if my brain was jello. I took some Tylenol for it, and it felt better, for a while. On day 3, I still felt uneasy, my brain still felt like it was swimming in jello. Not a good feeling.
I gave up.
On day 4, I made my coffee again, and consumed it. I was back to normal again.
It seemed as if coffee is some type of anti-inflammatory, that helps to keep your brain cells nice and tightly bound together.
If social order breaks down, then coffee is going to be short supply. People are going to have some bad days ahead.
Hopefully, Trump can order that coffee farms stay open, and Starbucks can remain open as an essential business.
Calling coffee a mind-altering substance is pretty rich. I've heard this sentiment before and it's so flippant in it's lack of perspective (intentionally so) that its not worth discussing further.
This is as far as I got because of the paywall anyway. I really wish HN would just outright reject submissions from domains known to have paywalls. Forget trying to fish it from Google or some archive/cache.
What is rich about calling coffee a mind altering substance? Sensibility varies across people, but as an occasional drinker, if I drink a cup of coffee (especially on an empty stomach), I get a strong buzz going for a solid 30 minutes or so. Not so different from a hit of nicotine (which I do not consume with any regularity either).
As far as my own body goes, I have no problem working and focusing while drinking a beer. For coffee, I may have to wait until the caffeine buzz subsided before I can really focus again.
I’m genuinely happy for you, that you’ve figured out, that coffee was bad for you and that you were able to overcome using it.
However I also think it’s being unkind to your fellow humans, who’s metabolism may tolerate or even benefit from coffee (or whatever other substance) to extrapolate from your experience to our entire species.
And it seems maybe we’re not the only animals enjoying stimulants [0].
I like these kind of comments. For some reason, in most discussions, We fail to address the fact that we all don’t react similarly to foods, drugs, etc.
Plenty of people choose not to consume caffeine, they just don't make an issue of it, which is as it should be. Your personal choices don't have to be a cause.
To me the post sounded like there should be scrutiny of caffeine consumption as there was scrutiny of alcohol and nicotine. And I tend to agree with that. It’s a psychoactive substance that causes physical addiction so people should know the facts.
There aren't interest groups buying ad time for scaremongering or people beating the drum for moral superiority about the evils of caffeine... no. But energy drinks have gotten a bit of a bad wrap, and four loko with the caffeine and alcohol got banned... and if you have a heart condition or anxiety your doctor is going to advise you to lay off the coffee. Isn't that enough?
Or does it have to become a social evil for it to count?
I hope this comment of mine isn’t considered too low-quality, but is it any surprise that someone whose name is “flatTheCurve” would advocate compulsion over personal responsibility? :P
(And to avoid misinterpretation here, the original intent of flattening the curve to avoid hospital overrun I was fully behind. Now that we have more data, I find the people shrieking at their fellow citizens for going to the beach or public parks and demanding that they be prohibited from doing so to be detestable)
Interestingly, you've decided to conflate two completely unrelated situations here! I can only guess at whether this is due to spending insufficient energy analyzing the situation, or simply motivated reasoning.
Either way, it's important to recognize here that drinking coffee is a personal decision with personal consequences. Social distancing during a global pandemic has some personal consequences, but the majority of effects are on society (e.g. other people). By drinking coffee, flatTheCurve does no harm to people they come into contact with. By going into public, a hypothetical citizen exposes everyone they come into contact with to increased risk of infection. With infection comes risk of hospitalization, lifelong debilitating conditions (specifically permanent lung damage and strokes), and even death.
Going out in public for non-life-sustaining reasons during a global pandemic is more similar to tying your grandmother to a chair and forcing her to play Russian roulette than it is to drinking coffee.
Just curious, where do you draw the line on this reasoning? For example, would you feel the same way during a particularly bad flu season that did not have a novel virus like we are faced with currently?
Just trying to get a read to know how to best respond. Everything we do in society carries risks, particularly of spreading infection (influenza, meningitis, staph, strep etc), and generally historically we have not taken such a hard-line stance. Was that historic stance actually mistaken, and we should have always enacted these measures, or do you believe that this sars-cov-2 outbreak is such a different beast that it’s warranted now but wasn’t warranted previously?
BTW I agree drinking coffee is different in that the risk is entirely personal. I just wonder why we don’t view exposure to pathogens by venturing out into society through the same lens.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. And again as I told the other commenter I should not have posted my comment since I should have known it would just derail the discussion, but I am hopeful that our discussion and others might actually make it retroactively “worth it” if that makes sense.
See my previous comment here, that is a good starting point for my position. Happy to answer any questions. (BTW I made a statement in that post that covid is an order of magnitude less deadly than the flu for those under 30, I no longer stand by that statement because it’s been hard to get age-stratified influenza IFR data as well as the uncertainty of covid-related mortality data. I still think the statement is true for <18 due to the varying risk distributions that I explained in that post)
—
Incidentally, I should have listened to my gut and not posted in this thread originally since I fear I might be derailing this discussion. So, I’m sorry for that. But for now I don’t think deleting my comment in this thread is a good idea at this point since we might end up having a useful discussion.
I must admit, this was a much more cogent and well-reasoned argument than I expected to receive - and, in fact, the only argument more coherent than "but muh freedoms/portfolio!" that I've heard in favour of ending quarantine orders. Thank you for that - and I apologise for prejudging you.
If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.
The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.
> The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.
Haha, exactly that. I have issues with the ethics of the government "manufacturing" a problem and then riding in to solve it, even though I personally support UBI, so I'm against rolling it out under these conditions. But more broadly, echoing what you said, we know at least in the US that the government would completely fuck it up.
> If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.
Exactly that. In particular I've been talking a lot about suicides and overdoses but the next thread for me to pull on is the mortality due to social isolation itself. We know that social isolation is heavily correlated with worsened outcomes for pretty much every disease, but it's probably hard to find research putting a number on it.
But anyway, I really do think the important point to decide on is basically: "Is containment feasible?". If it is, then theoretically lockdown _could_ be worth it, although I oppose it on constitutional and ethical grounds to such an extent that I would never support it for anything short of the zombie apocalypse.
If containment is not feasible, which I think in the US is a totally foregone conclusion, then nothing we're doing is decreasing covid mortality at all. So all we're doing is introducing a net new category of lockdown-related mortality , which as I've said previously is actually nnot a big overlap with the covid mortality since a huge chunk of those dying from covid aren't in the workforce or will only be in the workforce for a few more years anyway.
BTW, not sure if you've seen the Dr Erickson / Dr Massihi video floating around (the one that Youtube has just censored), but I think it's really worth watching. They absolutely butchered the statistics, making a ton of imprecise and/or outright wrong statements, yet everything else they say about immunology and social isolation is entirely valid. And it's really that whole philosophy that we need people to understand: hiding inside, preventing exposure to pathogens, these are things that decrease our ability to defeat infection.
Caffeine is incredibly benign compared to alcohol and nicotine, and so far research has shown that it may actually be a net positive in moderate amounts in terms of cardiovascular health.
If you're worried about gastrointestinal problems, you can switch to tea. Much less acidic and harsh on the stomach, and some varieties have enough l-theanine to counter the negative effects of caffeine. If you're worried about the caffeine content not being concentrated enough, you can even drink matcha, which typically has more caffeine per ml than American filtered coffee.
About 13 years later I’ve quit cold turkey after having some anxiety problems and headaches. I did some research and read a book which is from the nineties and a bit outdated but holds up pretty good. It basically cured both problems (but withdrawal symptoms the first days were tough, I admit).
For many people it’s ok to drink coffee I guess, but consider that it can affect you and almost no doctor will look into coffee consumption when you pay them a visit to see what could be the reason of some of those ailments. Also I saved a good chunk of money.
So no, you don’t need coffee. You need to give your brain a break (sleep properly) if it asks for it, and you don’t need to drug yourself with substances to “focus” and go on with your life. If life isn’t exciting then you may want to change it.
I recommend reading r/decaf for some interesting testimonies.