$9 Lattes Are The New Avocado Toast And It's Okay Feel Bad About It
We need more writing about coffee.
It’s the industry I’m in, after all, and I want to say at the outset that I love this shit. However, I open my computer every morning and ask myself what consumers will want to read: Are we tired of hearing about the latest trends? Is Third Space a just buzz word again? Do we really want to discover the correlation between coffee tariffs and housing crises and $9 lattes and if writing the phrase “ $9 lattes” is hyperbolic ragebait or a discussion on sustainable, post-pandemic-end-of-capitalism-millenials-just-need-something-that-makes-them-feel-anything business model?
As much as I witness myself and others being cynical about the state of the world and our addiction to global supply chains and our obsession with cafecore instagram carousels, I’m reminded that cynicism (like any “negative” behavior stemming from any “negative” emotion) is rooted in some of the most fundamental human feelings. And when I clock a feeling, any feeling, I’ve learned to pay attention, because this, in my opinion, is distinctly human and distinctly what makes the human experience so beautiful.
They’re all tropes by now
I love the ritual of my morning cup, I love the energy of a coffee shop and “let’s get coffee sometime” are popular phrases for a popular reason: cause we love to fucking feel. But it doesn’t always feel good.
Maybe some people aren’t thinking so negatively about this. I’m sure that some of you reading this have probably never thought that your coffee choices or options are anything but pleasurable and I really, really love that for you. I feel like I’m coming off as unappreciative but that’s actually the opposite of my point and I hope it shows by the time you’re done reading.
I’m writing to those of us still contending with the fact that we really love this stuff and how it makes us feel and yet we have all of this nuance and uncertainty surrounding our current state of affairs, and we’re not quite sure what to do about it even though we tell ourselves we’re fine with it most of the time. This is exactly why I’m writing.
What we’re witnessing within ourselves is indeed much larger than just coffee. This amazing beverage that’s traded globally more than pretty everything else in the world (it’s second only to oil-notably another form of energy) has this unique, beautiful ability to breakdown the walls of literally the entire global supply chain in order to bring enjoyment and connection to billions of people everyday.
In this perspective, I feel like my smallish, 12 ounce (350 ml to the rest of the world) cup in the morning is really this giant metaphor for all of the chaos of the world I feel staring me right in the face while I’m not sure what to do about it. I see in this moment the farmers and the importers and the roasters and the communities and the ecosystems and the 3-5 years it takes for a coffee tree to bear fruit (yes it’s a fruit and yes it takes years after planting to produce!) and this wild chance that all of this happened for me to have 5 minutes to myself in the morning.
Simultaneously, I look at my coffee in the morning and ask myself why I make such a big deal about such a small experience- just one moment of one day when time goes on infinitely and it’s not really that big of a deal, right? Then I think of how I’ve made this into an almost two decade career and I obviously so deeply care about the stuff.
So I’m left to sit with this feeling, this deep resonant feeling that everything in my life points to everything else, and I’m almost brought to tears about it.
Everything means nothing at all and then it means something again
Stick with me for a second. I was talking with a friend last year about the nihilism of millennials. We’re this distinct group of people that were the last generation to grow up without the constant use of digital technology at our fingertips and were then thrust into adulthood and careers in which we had to quickly make sense of a completely new way of being. This caused a significant distrust of most things in our lives that I won’t go into now. Ultimately, though, it produced an underlying nihilism that has made us uncertain and confused but also resilient and appreciative.
My friend and I were discussing the implications of what it means to look for the beauty in the middle of uncertainty; the idea that we really give a shit but are still lacking the ability to fully understand and trust it. What do we call this interesting sort of positivity that stares in the face of feeling like everything feels fucked?
It’s Hope.
The feeling that we’re experiencing? The movement between yes and no and maybe and fear and connection and joy and sorrow and beauty? It’s a motion in which we’re constantly moving, constantly growing, constantly failing. It’s a dance in which we’re falling and getting back up again. It’s the idea that sometimes life gives us exactly what we want or better. It’s also the realization that life gives us the exact opposite of what we want and can be hard as hell. And the beautiful thing is that we get to do it together, and we get to keep at it.
So on your way to work in the morning, on weekends at brunch or for those of us lucky enough to be able to have a cup in the afternoon with a piece of pie after lunch (mmm that feeling! holy shit), I would love for you to remember that the reason you get coffee, and maybe the reason you do anything, is to feel and feel fully, and it’s fucking beautiful.
