Also indicative of a health care accessibility crisis. I was guzzling Red Bulls like water, turns out I was exhausted all the time because of an undiagnosed thyroid issue. because of a cross country move I lost my family doctor, and wouldn't have figured it out had I not visited my childhood doctor while home for Christmas.
Fatigue is a common symptom of a lot of things. Caffeine is accessible and doesn't need tests or a prescription.
That’s really the main gist of the article; we’re running on stimulants because we’re exhausted from being overworked, underpaid and stressed beyond belief in the current economy. ‘We’ being the working class or rapidly disappearing middle class, with many people holding down two or even three jobs (or adding a ‘side hustle’) and working 60 hours a week no longer being that unusual. It’s a cheap way to keep ourselves awake enough to work the hours we need to survive.
I have severe ADHD and I have prescription stimulants, but for several years they weren’t enough to keep me awake. So I had a Red Bull every morning. Took me forever to realize that it was causing gastrointestinal issues, and the reason I was tired all the time was due to me not sleeping well because of my weed habit. I finally stopped drinking Red Bull and quit the weed, and now I feel like a normal person.
We have way too many side fixes. I think adequate healthcare would certainly help for most people.
I’m well aware of women I know who will take a caffeine pill or drink a low-calorie energy drink for ‘energy’ instead of eating food, to stay slim. Stimulants are the poor man’s semaglutides
They’re less popular now because the GLP1s work better for weight loss and are safer, but there are some FDA approved stimulants for weight loss still available as well as over the counter meds like ephedrine or just consuming nicotine and caffeine.
bookmarked this to read later but i was literally just talking to the cashier at the convenience store in my new neighborhood and he said if i had suggestions on what products to carry i could tell them and i said more uncaffeinated drinks! easily 70% of the non alcoholic beverages in any given convenience now are turbo charged with caffeine. it’s insane
When I'm traveling I like to go get flavored seltzer to keep in my hotel room, and there is usually very little in the way of unsweet, in caffeinated, nonalcoholic options. I would love to have more.
me too!! i don’t mind a little sugar but like why are we adding it to coconut water? i don’t like the taste of stevia but have basically had to just get over it bc it’s in everything now. it’s stevia or 42g of sugar in a fucking herbal tea.
I really like this kind of writing style compared to the traditional journalistic "view from nowhere." This author has a point of view and a strong voice, but the article is also clearly factual and backed up with evidence.
Trying to not show bias takes away from the power of journalism. Like we all read The Jungle, Sinclair wasn't afraid to let you know his stance and that's part of WHY it's so moving - you're experiencing his human reaction to the horrors, not just learning about what happened.
absolutely not blaming those kids but it’s astounding to me that they didn’t notice. one cold brew and i’m buzzing like a fucking hummingbird 😂but young people are just built different, i’m old.
It was self-serve. A large had 390-400mg of caffeine. That's the recommended threshold for adult caffeine consumption. Two puts you at 800mg. Three of those drinks and you hit 1,200mg with just 2 refills. That puts you in the cardiac/seizure risk zone.
I can totally see how a teenager, especially, would drink the first one really fast, get a refill, finish that off relatively quickly and within an hour or less have 800+mg in their system before realizing how fucked they were.
One cup of coffee per day and that’s it. I started drinking coffee in high school. I only drank energy drinks during college finals. Even now if work is hectic and I’m doing chores I just grab zero sugar electrolytes. The last time I drank an energy drink was in April of this year. Water, water, water + getting a full night’s sleep is the key. Even if it means your hobbies are gone.
Tbf I did just shove my hobbies into the weekend so it’s not that bad. There are also a few days of the week when I come home and only have to heat-up leftovers, dishes, and do my pet’s food and water.
I’m also chronically ill though. Putting my body through excessive cups of coffee or energy drinks would mess up my gut and make my blood test results every 3-4 months look pretty bad.
It’s a combination of just not being able to get through the work day + life’s stresses + these companies knowing how to make these products addictive.
I mean the middle class (if we can even be called that anymore) cannot afford nannies, cleaning services, private daycares, etc. People work and then do their chores at home and also childcare.
I brought this up somewhere else but I’m chronically ill and I think that’s why I was just always more careful about these things.
People here do call cleaning services it’s like one of the only affordable things left and it’s $100-1200 a month depending on the size of your house and whether you get your house cleaned 1-4x a month.
I recognized this early on and made a lot of money investing in the companies producing it, partially because I realized I was consumer like 200 mg of caffeine a day for school
I started to realize this when I was a teen reflecting upon my caffeine addiction. I had difficulty getting up for school as a child, and at age 10 the doctor suggested I could have a little coffee in the morning. Since that day, I have had coffee or English tea every single morning with only a handful of exceptions. And all I did was join the adults early. I started working as boring assembly job as a teenager, and coffee was always kept brewing and everyone drank massive amounts.
Then the full realization set in when I went to nursing school and almost everyoneelse was on Adderall. I think I could have made it through if I had been as well! I knew something was seriously fucked up when 3/4 of students at a top nursing university "had ADHD".
Later in life I was actually diagnosed with ADHD, to my surprise, and I really truly suffer the symptoms of it. So...
I wonder what the heck is going on.
I also can't imagine waking up in the morning and not taking a stimulant...
If 3/4 of the students in your nursing program had ADHD, and then you belatedly discovered you had ADHD, is it not possible the program selects for people with it?
And while I did mean that people shared drugs and questionable diagnoses, you actual have a very good point, u/MissPearl. If "everyone" is on stimulants, then the entire field from top to bottom is designed to work best for people on stimulants. Medical school is the absolute worse, but nursing school can be brutal, too. I totaled my car after not sleeping for 24+ hours, the semester I was scheduled with a night shift immediately followed by a day shift across town.
Oh, and they lectured us about "not looking tired"!
I think they meant that 3/4 of the students claimed to have ADHD in order to either get prescribed or justify their usage of Adderall or other stimulant medications, not that 3/4 of the students were legitimately diagnosed with it.
Yes, that is what I meant. There were also, and no doubt still are, certain psychiatrists who served those in the local medical field and knew "what's up". Their names were shared secretly. As a medical or nursing student you go to one them, get your stimulant-deficiency ("ADHD") diagnosis and come out with amphetamines in half an hour.
This actually radicalized me in some ways. I knew (know) several people who had been in and out of prison multiple times because of methamphamine. In other words, if you are wealthy and privileged enough, amphetamines are legal for you! The brand name for pharmaceutical meth is Desoxyn, by the way. Approved for ADHD. But if you are poor and have no insurance or connections to the upper class and are caught with the same substance (perhaps in an attempt to self-medicate) -- straight to jail.
I didn't take the stimulants because I was a "good girl" and I had high grades and I had been told as a child that being "bad at school" was a prerequisite for having ADHD. Now I am a bit wiser... I understand that it was not about having ADHD or not, it was about trying to compete in a environment designed and filled by people on amphetamines.
Anyway, if I die in a mysterious accident soon, it wasn't me I swear 😂
It’s not all about energy drinks - it goes back to the Nazis and Pervitin, through to cocaine and crack and then adderall abuse, and tours around the world to detail the various stimulants people use to survive their long shifts and horrible working conditions, and makes an interesting point about how sleep is (so far) one of the only human needs that capitalism hasn’t been able to ‘fix’ - although tech companies are trying (they mention a prototype device that would encourage sleeping workers to dream about coding problems, yikes.) It’s honestly a really good read, I promise!
Two years ago, my brother died in his sleep at age 23 due to an excessive energy drink habit. He was pursuing a PhD in Astrophysics. The world lost a potentially valuable asset that day. I shudder any time I go into a store and see these walls of drinks.
I’m so sorry for your loss. It absolutely horrifies me when I see kids at my son’s middle school drinking these all day - young bodies shouldn’t need artificial ‘energy.’ I can definitely imagine how the pressures of a demanding academic environment can make these things so tempting.
As someone who cannot drink any amount of caffeine, this is very frustrating. The rest of the world has this go-to thing to help them that I can't access.
On the other hand there are people who can't function without it. Also caffeine doesn't give you more energy it just blocks the feeling of tiredness.
Sorry you cant imbibe in coffees and teas though as they are tasty and have certain health benefits (though you can get theanine and antioxidants elsewhere) but unfortunately a lot of coffee drinkers I know are dependent...
It's a shame about your health condition that prevents you from drinking whatever you want, but you're probably healthier by not drinking coffee and getting addicted to it.
I'm with you. Coffee doesn't do anything violently bad, although it does make me jittery and sleepless ... but it provides no benefit whatsoever. Like, it doesn't give me pep or make me alert or provide energy. It just keeps me from sleeping when I want to be asleep. I wonder, sometimes, if meth would be the same,
My fav quote: "In the case of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they’re trying to expand their operations into space, building a kind of East India Company for the galaxy. But they’re also taking another angle, and trying to colonize time."
>
"they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes till half a dozen of them out-babble an equal number of us at gossipping,"
—The women’s petition against coffee (1674)
Honestly, this article seems pretty half-baked. People love caffeine because it makes them feel good. Simple as that.
Are Americans working longer hours or more overnight shifts in the past? Idk, the article doesn’t substantiate either trend, it just points to anecdotes like Amazon having an overnight shift. Are we even drinking more coffee than past generations? Unclear.
But energy drinks are icky! I can get behind that.
I think the main point of the article about capitalism chewing people up is correct but the supposed evidence is very over-broad. People just like drugs, and that isn’t limited to stimulants or capitalist societies. Hyper-capitalist South Korea has one of the highest alcohol consumption rates in the world. Indigenous cultures were chewing coca leaves for centuries before capitalism. My retired mom starts her day with a pot of coffee. Conflating Monster energy drinks (which my spouse drinks in the morning when he’s stayed up until 2 am playing video games) with truckers and agricultural workers taking amphetamines to meet grueling work requirements really weakens the argument.
> Indigenous cultures were chewing coca leaves for centuries before capitalism
FWIW they were also not utopian societies of equals and using coca leaves to avoid hunger or tiredness in the mandatory labour system as well as the Inca society are well attested.
So you might well read that as another example of a society using stimulants to extract more labour. Not all unequal societies are capitalistic, even from a Marxist viewpoint.
I agree that the piece would probably have benefited from focusing on ‘US economy is tanking, overworked and underpaid working class look to cheap stimulants to survive’ and it could definitely have used some more facts and stats, but it was an interesting read for me (but then again, I’ve always been interested in the history of drugs, and the US culture around prescription amphetamines in particular is so incredibly different to anywhere else in the world.) I was also surprised not to see any discussion of what happens at the end of the day - I know plenty of housewives who pop an Adderall prescribed to their kids in the morning, another half at midday, and then need a benzo or an ambien or 3/4 of a bottle of wine to sleep… what goes up must come down!
I saw Liquid Death launch a caffeinated seltzer where a selling point was that it didn't have insane amounts of caffeine. I felt so seen. I stopped buying energy drinks in large part because they were all at murder your heart levels, but I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't missed them when having to work crunch.
Green tea has about 30-50mg of caffeine per serving. That’s a little less than black tea, about the same as a can of cola, and 1/2 to 1/4 the caffeine of an equivalent amount of brewed coffee. It’s one of the lowest caffeine options out there, so you’re pretty safe with green tea (if you’re drinking matcha that’s more caffeinated because you’re consuming more of the tea, obviously.)
elle-elle-tee | 20 hours ago
Also indicative of a health care accessibility crisis. I was guzzling Red Bulls like water, turns out I was exhausted all the time because of an undiagnosed thyroid issue. because of a cross country move I lost my family doctor, and wouldn't have figured it out had I not visited my childhood doctor while home for Christmas.
Fatigue is a common symptom of a lot of things. Caffeine is accessible and doesn't need tests or a prescription.
ThatPhatKid_CanDraw | 17 hours ago
Also just poor labor protections. Work in all sorts of conditions, with little time off. Consumerism offers you this cheap way to get by.
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 16 hours ago
That’s really the main gist of the article; we’re running on stimulants because we’re exhausted from being overworked, underpaid and stressed beyond belief in the current economy. ‘We’ being the working class or rapidly disappearing middle class, with many people holding down two or even three jobs (or adding a ‘side hustle’) and working 60 hours a week no longer being that unusual. It’s a cheap way to keep ourselves awake enough to work the hours we need to survive.
__worldpeace | 15 hours ago
I have severe ADHD and I have prescription stimulants, but for several years they weren’t enough to keep me awake. So I had a Red Bull every morning. Took me forever to realize that it was causing gastrointestinal issues, and the reason I was tired all the time was due to me not sleeping well because of my weed habit. I finally stopped drinking Red Bull and quit the weed, and now I feel like a normal person.
We have way too many side fixes. I think adequate healthcare would certainly help for most people.
desertdweller2011 | 11 hours ago
i had red bull exactly once when it first came out. with vodka. as like, an 85 lb 16 year old. absolutely not one time in the 25 years since then lol.
ifitswhatusayiloveit | 7 hours ago
I’m where you are but need to quit the weed 🫠
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 18 hours ago
I’m well aware of women I know who will take a caffeine pill or drink a low-calorie energy drink for ‘energy’ instead of eating food, to stay slim. Stimulants are the poor man’s semaglutides
NullDelta | 17 hours ago
They’re less popular now because the GLP1s work better for weight loss and are safer, but there are some FDA approved stimulants for weight loss still available as well as over the counter meds like ephedrine or just consuming nicotine and caffeine.
desertdweller2011 | a day ago
bookmarked this to read later but i was literally just talking to the cashier at the convenience store in my new neighborhood and he said if i had suggestions on what products to carry i could tell them and i said more uncaffeinated drinks! easily 70% of the non alcoholic beverages in any given convenience now are turbo charged with caffeine. it’s insane
pipkin42 | 14 hours ago
When I'm traveling I like to go get flavored seltzer to keep in my hotel room, and there is usually very little in the way of unsweet, in caffeinated, nonalcoholic options. I would love to have more.
desertdweller2011 | 11 hours ago
me too!! i don’t mind a little sugar but like why are we adding it to coconut water? i don’t like the taste of stevia but have basically had to just get over it bc it’s in everything now. it’s stevia or 42g of sugar in a fucking herbal tea.
notaquarterback | 7 hours ago
there are SO many vape products it's insane
moriartygotswag | 17 hours ago
Fantastic article. Particularly a fan of the throwaway line that not enough public health researchers are Marxists.
pettypeniswrinkle | 13 hours ago
I really like this kind of writing style compared to the traditional journalistic "view from nowhere." This author has a point of view and a strong voice, but the article is also clearly factual and backed up with evidence.
karpaediem | 12 hours ago
Trying to not show bias takes away from the power of journalism. Like we all read The Jungle, Sinclair wasn't afraid to let you know his stance and that's part of WHY it's so moving - you're experiencing his human reaction to the horrors, not just learning about what happened.
desertdweller2011 | 10 hours ago
as a public health researcher i 1000% agree 🫠
TienIsCoolX | a day ago
Remember when panera charged all their drinks and a few teenagers died?
as-well | 15 hours ago
woah what they put 400mg of caffeine into a single drink?
That's insane. That's four cups of filter coffee or 8-10 Espressi. My hands almost shake and I can barely sleep after 8 Espresssi.
TienIsCoolX | 13 hours ago
Yes and free refills, so you had people hanging around studying or whatever and drinking multiple in a day.
desertdweller2011 | 10 hours ago
absolutely not blaming those kids but it’s astounding to me that they didn’t notice. one cold brew and i’m buzzing like a fucking hummingbird 😂but young people are just built different, i’m old.
ReverendDizzle | 8 hours ago
It was self-serve. A large had 390-400mg of caffeine. That's the recommended threshold for adult caffeine consumption. Two puts you at 800mg. Three of those drinks and you hit 1,200mg with just 2 refills. That puts you in the cardiac/seizure risk zone.
I can totally see how a teenager, especially, would drink the first one really fast, get a refill, finish that off relatively quickly and within an hour or less have 800+mg in their system before realizing how fucked they were.
CommonInterview9015 | 5 hours ago
love that you’re using the correct plural. I bet you say octopodes too
fiddler764 | 23 hours ago
God I miss those drinks. Yes the death is a sad tragedy, but one of those drinks had me moving and feeling good.
Samstarmoon | 4 hours ago
I only got to try it 2x and it was honestly amazing
seiryuu-abi | a day ago
One cup of coffee per day and that’s it. I started drinking coffee in high school. I only drank energy drinks during college finals. Even now if work is hectic and I’m doing chores I just grab zero sugar electrolytes. The last time I drank an energy drink was in April of this year. Water, water, water + getting a full night’s sleep is the key. Even if it means your hobbies are gone.
ErsatzHaderach | 12 hours ago
My hobbies aren't a worthwhile trade for being able to eschew caffeine :/
seiryuu-abi | 11 hours ago
Tbf I did just shove my hobbies into the weekend so it’s not that bad. There are also a few days of the week when I come home and only have to heat-up leftovers, dishes, and do my pet’s food and water.
I’m also chronically ill though. Putting my body through excessive cups of coffee or energy drinks would mess up my gut and make my blood test results every 3-4 months look pretty bad.
yes_please_ | 17 hours ago
Yeah I was one cup before my kid was born and now it's 2. I cannot comprehend it when people say they drink 4-5 coffees a day.
seiryuu-abi | 11 hours ago
It’s a combination of just not being able to get through the work day + life’s stresses + these companies knowing how to make these products addictive.
I mean the middle class (if we can even be called that anymore) cannot afford nannies, cleaning services, private daycares, etc. People work and then do their chores at home and also childcare.
I brought this up somewhere else but I’m chronically ill and I think that’s why I was just always more careful about these things.
People here do call cleaning services it’s like one of the only affordable things left and it’s $100-1200 a month depending on the size of your house and whether you get your house cleaned 1-4x a month.
cheapskateskirtsteak | a day ago
I recognized this early on and made a lot of money investing in the companies producing it, partially because I realized I was consumer like 200 mg of caffeine a day for school
global_peasant | a day ago
I started to realize this when I was a teen reflecting upon my caffeine addiction. I had difficulty getting up for school as a child, and at age 10 the doctor suggested I could have a little coffee in the morning. Since that day, I have had coffee or English tea every single morning with only a handful of exceptions. And all I did was join the adults early. I started working as boring assembly job as a teenager, and coffee was always kept brewing and everyone drank massive amounts.
Then the full realization set in when I went to nursing school and almost everyone else was on Adderall. I think I could have made it through if I had been as well! I knew something was seriously fucked up when 3/4 of students at a top nursing university "had ADHD".
Later in life I was actually diagnosed with ADHD, to my surprise, and I really truly suffer the symptoms of it. So...
I wonder what the heck is going on.
I also can't imagine waking up in the morning and not taking a stimulant...
MissPearl | 17 hours ago
If 3/4 of the students in your nursing program had ADHD, and then you belatedly discovered you had ADHD, is it not possible the program selects for people with it?
global_peasant | 12 hours ago
And while I did mean that people shared drugs and questionable diagnoses, you actual have a very good point, u/MissPearl. If "everyone" is on stimulants, then the entire field from top to bottom is designed to work best for people on stimulants. Medical school is the absolute worse, but nursing school can be brutal, too. I totaled my car after not sleeping for 24+ hours, the semester I was scheduled with a night shift immediately followed by a day shift across town.
Oh, and they lectured us about "not looking tired"!
kollaps3 | 15 hours ago
I think they meant that 3/4 of the students claimed to have ADHD in order to either get prescribed or justify their usage of Adderall or other stimulant medications, not that 3/4 of the students were legitimately diagnosed with it.
global_peasant | 12 hours ago
Yes, that is what I meant. There were also, and no doubt still are, certain psychiatrists who served those in the local medical field and knew "what's up". Their names were shared secretly. As a medical or nursing student you go to one them, get your stimulant-deficiency ("ADHD") diagnosis and come out with amphetamines in half an hour.
This actually radicalized me in some ways. I knew (know) several people who had been in and out of prison multiple times because of methamphamine. In other words, if you are wealthy and privileged enough, amphetamines are legal for you! The brand name for pharmaceutical meth is Desoxyn, by the way. Approved for ADHD. But if you are poor and have no insurance or connections to the upper class and are caught with the same substance (perhaps in an attempt to self-medicate) -- straight to jail.
I didn't take the stimulants because I was a "good girl" and I had high grades and I had been told as a child that being "bad at school" was a prerequisite for having ADHD. Now I am a bit wiser... I understand that it was not about having ADHD or not, it was about trying to compete in a environment designed and filled by people on amphetamines.
Anyway, if I die in a mysterious accident soon, it wasn't me I swear 😂
global_peasant | a day ago
Oh, it's all about energy drinks. Gross. My points still stand.
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | a day ago
It’s not all about energy drinks - it goes back to the Nazis and Pervitin, through to cocaine and crack and then adderall abuse, and tours around the world to detail the various stimulants people use to survive their long shifts and horrible working conditions, and makes an interesting point about how sleep is (so far) one of the only human needs that capitalism hasn’t been able to ‘fix’ - although tech companies are trying (they mention a prototype device that would encourage sleeping workers to dream about coding problems, yikes.) It’s honestly a really good read, I promise!
global_peasant | 23 hours ago
Oh damn, I gave up too early! Okay, I believe you,
I'm going back...
7LayerRainbow | 4 hours ago
Two years ago, my brother died in his sleep at age 23 due to an excessive energy drink habit. He was pursuing a PhD in Astrophysics. The world lost a potentially valuable asset that day. I shudder any time I go into a store and see these walls of drinks.
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 4 hours ago
I’m so sorry for your loss. It absolutely horrifies me when I see kids at my son’s middle school drinking these all day - young bodies shouldn’t need artificial ‘energy.’ I can definitely imagine how the pressures of a demanding academic environment can make these things so tempting.
sulwen314 | a day ago
As someone who cannot drink any amount of caffeine, this is very frustrating. The rest of the world has this go-to thing to help them that I can't access.
TellaTalla | 23 hours ago
On the other hand there are people who can't function without it. Also caffeine doesn't give you more energy it just blocks the feeling of tiredness.
Sorry you cant imbibe in coffees and teas though as they are tasty and have certain health benefits (though you can get theanine and antioxidants elsewhere) but unfortunately a lot of coffee drinkers I know are dependent...
InnerKookaburra | a day ago
Well, there is a downside as well, so perhaps it's a blessing.
sulwen314 | a day ago
I just wish I had the choice, you know? It's hard when your body dictates these things for you.
saryndipitous | 23 hours ago
What about theobromine in chocolate?
sulwen314 | 22 hours ago
Chocolate fortunately doesn't wreck my stomach, but even decaf coffee or a tiny sip of soda and my day is ruined.
Lysmerry | 15 hours ago
I feel this way about alcohol. I want to have fun!
sulwen314 | 15 hours ago
THANK YOU. I get why a bunch of people are telling me that it's unhealthy anyway, but sometimes I just want a damn cup of coffee!
Lysmerry | 14 hours ago
Yeah, it’s not just the buzz you get, it’s also participating socially, being in on things
sulwen314 | 13 hours ago
Absolutely. It's a social expectation, and it sucks to always have to be the one saying no.
justalittlestupid | 17 hours ago
I’m with you. It’s super frustrating. I’m tired all the time.
IC_1318 | 18 hours ago
It's a shame about your health condition that prevents you from drinking whatever you want, but you're probably healthier by not drinking coffee and getting addicted to it.
HootieRocker59 | 13 hours ago
I'm with you. Coffee doesn't do anything violently bad, although it does make me jittery and sleepless ... but it provides no benefit whatsoever. Like, it doesn't give me pep or make me alert or provide energy. It just keeps me from sleeping when I want to be asleep. I wonder, sometimes, if meth would be the same,
False_Organization56 | 22 hours ago
Maybe try a small amount of yerba mate?
Moonlight_Brawl | 17 hours ago
bro I read this in sassy the sasquatch’s voice
karpaediem | 12 hours ago
My fav quote: "In the case of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they’re trying to expand their operations into space, building a kind of East India Company for the galaxy. But they’re also taking another angle, and trying to colonize time."
joyofsovietcooking | 18 hours ago
You know who also had a reliance on performance-enhancing drugs to survive their working hours? The Nazis, that's who. Totally blitzed.
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 17 hours ago
That’s referenced in the article. I’ve read Blitzed, it’s a great book.
mitch_conner98 | 17 hours ago
Take some methamphetamine and drink some coffee and tell me which one changed you more
cortechthrowaway | 18 hours ago
> "they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes till half a dozen of them out-babble an equal number of us at gossipping,"
—The women’s petition against coffee (1674)
Honestly, this article seems pretty half-baked. People love caffeine because it makes them feel good. Simple as that.
Are Americans working longer hours or more overnight shifts in the past? Idk, the article doesn’t substantiate either trend, it just points to anecdotes like Amazon having an overnight shift. Are we even drinking more coffee than past generations? Unclear.
But energy drinks are icky! I can get behind that.
bicyclecat | 17 hours ago
I think the main point of the article about capitalism chewing people up is correct but the supposed evidence is very over-broad. People just like drugs, and that isn’t limited to stimulants or capitalist societies. Hyper-capitalist South Korea has one of the highest alcohol consumption rates in the world. Indigenous cultures were chewing coca leaves for centuries before capitalism. My retired mom starts her day with a pot of coffee. Conflating Monster energy drinks (which my spouse drinks in the morning when he’s stayed up until 2 am playing video games) with truckers and agricultural workers taking amphetamines to meet grueling work requirements really weakens the argument.
as-well | 15 hours ago
> Indigenous cultures were chewing coca leaves for centuries before capitalism
FWIW they were also not utopian societies of equals and using coca leaves to avoid hunger or tiredness in the mandatory labour system as well as the Inca society are well attested.
So you might well read that as another example of a society using stimulants to extract more labour. Not all unequal societies are capitalistic, even from a Marxist viewpoint.
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 16 hours ago
I agree that the piece would probably have benefited from focusing on ‘US economy is tanking, overworked and underpaid working class look to cheap stimulants to survive’ and it could definitely have used some more facts and stats, but it was an interesting read for me (but then again, I’ve always been interested in the history of drugs, and the US culture around prescription amphetamines in particular is so incredibly different to anywhere else in the world.) I was also surprised not to see any discussion of what happens at the end of the day - I know plenty of housewives who pop an Adderall prescribed to their kids in the morning, another half at midday, and then need a benzo or an ambien or 3/4 of a bottle of wine to sleep… what goes up must come down!
alxlwn | 11 hours ago
This is why I don't drink coffee!
ozifrage | 8 hours ago
I saw Liquid Death launch a caffeinated seltzer where a selling point was that it didn't have insane amounts of caffeine. I felt so seen. I stopped buying energy drinks in large part because they were all at murder your heart levels, but I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't missed them when having to work crunch.
Thin-Heat241 | 15 hours ago
I love green tea tho 😭
[OP] iconoclastic_glow | 5 hours ago
Green tea has about 30-50mg of caffeine per serving. That’s a little less than black tea, about the same as a can of cola, and 1/2 to 1/4 the caffeine of an equivalent amount of brewed coffee. It’s one of the lowest caffeine options out there, so you’re pretty safe with green tea (if you’re drinking matcha that’s more caffeinated because you’re consuming more of the tea, obviously.)
Puzzleheaded_Toe3584 | 15 hours ago
One more thing to worry about! I think I need a stimulant now.