How Coffee can be Properly Ordered in One’s Life
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It’s common to hear students talk about, and be pretty proud of, getting less than five hours of rest and substituting caffeine for sleep.
Students have normalized drinking a cup of coffee every morning to get going. The idea of a daily cup of coffee is so ingrained in us today that we don’t even think to critique it, and for most of us, it’s kind of impossible to get on without it.
Slogans like “but first–coffee” or “don’t talk to me before my coffee” or “all I need is coffee and Jesus” are everywhere. Many people use these sayings ironically, but the point stands: we have a disturbing dependency on coffee.
I mean, replace “coffee” with “heroin” or “crack”, and you’ll end up in an addiction recovery center. Anything that you rely on to get through the day is probably not healthy.Beyond that, caffeine doesn’t really work in the long run.
Caffeine essentially blocks the receptors that make us feel tired. While blocking these receptors energizes us, it also prevents us from getting the deep sleep we need to really clear our brains out. This makes us groggier when we wake up, which makes us drink more coffee, and so the cycle continues, easily turning into an addiction.
One could argue that relying on coffee isn’t necessarily bad because many already rely on daily medications for health issues. However, medicine is meant to make your body work the way it was intended to work, while caffeine does just the opposite. It tries to fight what your body is telling you to do: rest.
Coffee culture normalizes drinking coffee daily. However, it is only a subset of a larger culture of constant movement. In our day and age, everything pushes towards things happening more often and faster. When things speed up, sleep is the first thing to go because we don’t find rest important anymore.
But beyond the fact that sleep in the long run boosts your quality of performance in those areas that we usually drink coffee for, prioritizing things like sleep helps us prioritize rest in general.
When we are always moving, we become slaves to the necessities of life. In contrast, when we start to give ourselves time to rest, we can appreciate the world as it should be appreciated.
With all that said, I can’t and won’t argue for the abolition of coffee. The University of Dallas’s cap bar is perhaps the greatest establishment in Texas, and especially for college students, coffee can be pretty necessary to survive sometimes.
If you need to get less sleep than desired every once in a while to finish an essay, there’s nothing wrong with a few shots of espresso. It’s wonderful to enjoy a cup of coffee on a porch, or to grab coffee with a friend; that’s often a way to appreciate the world. However, there’s something toxic about not being able to function without it.
This is admittedly a bit of an idealized view of life. Most of us don’t have the opportunity to rest as much as we like. Even if we wished to be able to get all the sleep we wanted, we couldn’t achieve it.
I think there are ways to drink coffee more healthily. For example, practicing the virtue of self-control and limiting yourself to one cup per day can prove helpful.
Beyond that, there are other ways to slow down life. You can take little pockets of quiet and stillness by renting a hammock on a free afternoon, driving without music or avoiding the use of your phone during spare minutes.
The world is made for man, not man for the world. A life focused on only end-goals is not a life well-lived. Coffee can often contribute to a need to get things done, rather than slow down and rest. By all means drink it, but do it sparingly, exercise prudence and savor your cappuccino.
Mary Cavanna is a sophomore English major.