You Know What It Does To Your Brain

You Don't Know Where It Came From

Or Who Tried To Stop It

Or How Many Times They Failed

The Morning Drink In Your Cup Has A Longer History Than The Country You Live In

The People Who Tried To Ban It Could Not Keep It Down

THIS NEWSLETTER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. NOTHING IN THIS CONTENT CONSTITUTES MEDICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, OR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. ALWAYS CONSULT A QUALIFIED HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY HEALTH RELATED DECISIONS.

OKAY BACK FROM THE FIELDS 🌄

The Most Widely Told Origin Of Coffee Involves A Ninth Century Ethiopian Goat Herder Named Kaldi

He Noticed His Animals Were Not Sleeping After Eating Berries From A Particular Tree

He Brought The Berries To A Monastery

A Monk Made A Drink

He Stayed Awake Through Evening Prayer

This Story Is Almost Certainly Not Historically Accurate

It Is Still The Story The World Settled On

That Says Something About What The World Needed Coffee To Be

Accidental. Pastoral. Innocent

A Discovery, Not An Invention

The Actual Documented History Of Coffee Begins In Yemen In The Fifteenth Century

Sufi Monks Used The Drink To Sustain Nighttime Devotional Practice

The Ability To Stay Awake Without Sleeping Was Not Recreational

It Was Spiritual

The Drug Found Its First Market In Religion

By The Sixteenth Century, Coffee Had Spread Throughout The Arabian Peninsula

The Coffeehouse Was Not A Café

It Was The Primary Venue For Public Intellectual Life

In 1511, The Governor Of Mecca Attempted To Ban Coffee On The Grounds That It Was Intoxicating

He Was Overruled Within Months

The Ottoman Sultan Selim I Found The Tax Revenue More Persuasive Than The Prohibition Argument

Coffee Would Be Banned And Unbanned Across The Middle East For The Next Century

Each Ban Failed For The Same Reason

People Kept Drinking It

The Government Kept Losing The Revenue

The Ottoman Coffeehouse Became The First Institution In History To

Aggregate Strangers By Shared Interest Rather Than Kinship Or Religion

You Went To Drink Coffee And Encounter Whoever Else Was There

Ideas Spread

Political Dissent Organized

Rulers Correctly Identified The Coffeehouse As A Space They Could Not Fully Surveil

In 1675, King Charles II Of England Attempted To Ban Coffeehouses Outright

He Argued They Spread Seditious Discourse

He Reversed The Ban Eleven Days Later

The Political Cost Had Exceeded The Political Benefit

Coffee Had Already Learned, By 1675, How To Survive Its Own Prohibition

The British Colonies In North America Were A Tea Drinking Culture

Tea From The East India Company Was The Default

In December 1773, Colonists Dumped British Tea Into Boston Harbor

The Tea Party Was Not Primarily About Tea

It Was About The Monopoly The British Parliament Had Granted The East India Company

Tea Happened To Be The Product

The Political Necessity Of Not Drinking British Tea Transformed Coffee Into

The Patriotic American Drink

Drinking Coffee Was, In The Years Following, A Statement Of Allegiance

You Drank It Because You Were American

You Were American In Part Because You Had Declared That Britain's Product Was Not Yours

The Culture Built Around That Decision Is Now So Durable

That Americans Consume More Coffee Per Capita Than Almost Any Other Nation On Earth

The Reason Is Not The Taste

The Reason Is A Boycott That Happened Two Hundred Fifty Years Ago

There Is A Body Of Research On Workplace Mobbing

The Coordinated Social Exclusion And Targeting Of An Individual

That Consistently Shows Outcomes Including Clinical Depression, Complex PTSD, And In Severe Cases

Physical Deterioration Associated With Chronic Stress

The HPA Axis

The Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal System That Governs The Stress Response

Does Not Distinguish Between Physical And Social Threat

Being Systematically Excluded And Targeted By A Group

Produces The Same Cortisol Profile As Being In Physical Danger

The Shit Stirrer Who Set This In Motion

Often Experiences No Consequences At All

Because By The Time The Damage Is Visible

The Story About Who Caused It Has Already Been Written

And They Wrote It

The Person Who Always Seems To Be Near The Drama

Who Always Has The Most Information

Who Always Seems Concerned But Never Seems To Help The Situation Improve

Who Leaves Every Room In A State That Is Slightly Worse Than When They Arrived

Is Not Unlucky

They Are Not A Coincidence

The Pattern Is The Data

The Data Has A Name