On Getting High At Work

Pop culture and the meaning of life. Mini-essays written and illustrated by grimy, human hands.

My old boss would inhale a line or three, and fight the photocopier. I don't know why he enjoyed kicking the shit out of office equipment, but I can guess his motivation for combining work with cocaine.

Because it's also what motivated me to suck the coffee machine dry. I wanted caffeine to transform my worried self into something more economically attractive: tireless, focused, and enthusiastic. A production line of commercially-appealing thoughts. "A USP would max the ROI on that CTA." "We should do a podcast." 

But coffee never prompted me to consider coffee itself: “Why is caffeine, a powerful psychoactive, freely available in every company?”      

Somebody else considered it, though: Michael Pollan, journalist and charming dad of altered states. He also wrote a lovely essay on the subject, impeccably structured and peppered with his usual mix of warmth, wit, and deep research.

Here’s a truncated version of Pollan's argument. You can find the whole magnificent piece in his book This Is Your Mind On Plants (2021).

Before the 1600s, society was drunk. If you'd been alive then, you'd have been drunk too. You and everyone you loved, shit-faced way past the point where anyone's having fun.  

Labourers had beer breaks because beer was safer than water. Pollan: “Mental clarity was not a priority, nor was attention to clock time.” After the 1600s, caffeine hit Western cities and bloodstreams, resulting in…capitalism. 

Or rather, resulting first in the Enlightenment and then capitalism. The Age of Reason was birthed in coffeehouses, with ideas generated at a jittery pace. The tone of these ideas was peculiar to caffeinated states: rational, as opposed to the free association resulting from other, fun-er drugs. 

Mix your Enlightenment with Protestantism, add a shot, and you get today’s white-collar workplace. A blend of caffeine-related sleep deprivation, analysis, long hours (only possible with stimulants like coffee), and the belief that if we work hard now, everything will be better soon. Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains that caffeine “spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfil spiritually and ideologically.”      

Office coffee didn't officially arrive until the 1950s, starting when a Denver-based company dosed its older workers with caffeine and saw a pleasing increase in productivity. Predictably, the company first demanded its employees get high for profit on their own dime–only after a court case did free coffee breaks become enshrined in the working day. 

So maybe coffee is indeed budget cocaine: you do it to feel competent, and competence is what the machinery governing our lives desires most. I also suspect there's a Machiatto Illuminati, consisting of shadowy figures from Starbucks, Costa and Dunkin' (formerly Dunkin' Donuts) who gather annually in a bunker under Connecticut to share PowerPoints on humanity's continued enslavement...before having an orgy in which everyone ecstatically mispronounces each other's name.       

Aside: as part of his research, Pollan cut out caffeine for three months. He described re-losing his coffee virginity as “a trip,” so intense were its effects. Hence my animation, above.   

This letter was written under the influence of seventeen cups of coffee (but no cocaine).