For 10 years, I was a true coffee connoisseur. I was into everything: Aeropress, pour-over, espresso. I tried various kettles, grinders, water filters, and coffee minerals.

Why should you give up coffee? Let me explain. The idea is rather interesting. I believe it’s worth doing if you have fallen victim to this fashionable trend. It’s important to understand the situation you are in.

Let’s start with the origins. We won’t dwell on this for long, but suffice it to say, living in debt is wrong. If you are in this incentive system, debt is not something you should engage in. When you drink coffee, you live on credit because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, suppressing the sleep signal. As a result, you can stay awake and get things done.

Perhaps, in life, one out of ten times, you need to bring yourself to a state where you can do something extra. But if this becomes a daily routine, sooner or later, you realize it’s a drug. You become dependent, raise your cortisol levels, go against yourself, don’t value your life, and turn into a person who just forces themselves to do something every day without understanding why it’s necessary.

This is a deep topic, because coffee has not only a chemical dependency, which is relatively weak. Essentially, there won’t be severe withdrawal, there will be a period when you’ll need to sleep more, maybe have a headache, but it’s not as scary as with heavy drugs. However, I’m convinced there’s a psychological dependency. It’s very hard to give up the state of euphoria that a person experiences when drinking coffee at the right moment.

Why has coffee become such a popular drink? In Italy, for example, workers in factories drank espresso. After meals, to avoid falling asleep, they’d have an espresso and go back to work as if nothing had happened. In the USA, the coffee break is a corporate and cultural phenomenon. It’s a part of the business world and social dynamics. People meet, socialize. There’s the concept of the “third place” — home, work, and coffee shops.

Coffee has become a mainstream product of a multi-billion dollar economy. With the onset of industrialization, workers had a need for stimulation. Coffee is a stimulant that induces a state of tunnel vision, allowing people to work to exhaustion.

Now, in 2024, this has turned into a cult of addicts. In the morning on the beach, I see people with plastic cups of coffee. It’s become automatic behavior. The first instinct in the morning is to go get coffee. You can’t help but call it an addiction, because your morning should be a clean slate. If the first thing you want to do in the morning is consume something, this indicates you’re partially an addict.

This behavior is instilled from childhood: Coca-Cola contains caffeine, chocolate contains caffeine. We love it from childhood because it gives us a certain boost. The body is happy that there’s a way to get “free” energy. Now we’re talking about specialty coffee, high-quality coffee, single origin. Everything that people drink, all sorts of blends — they’re neither healthy nor tasty. I don’t like the smell of blends. If you’re going to drink coffee, it should at least be light roast, tasty, and not some ambiguous mixture.

Now it’s no longer a craft scene. Once, coffee was a drink for the minority, where you could find good beans. But now it’s not the case. Starbucks is a huge company, part of a multi-billion dollar industry. Standardizing taste happens through heavy roasting. People consume the taste of the roast, not the coffee itself. It’s a sad story.

The body is grateful for the taste of coffee because it sees it as an additional stimulus for work. But the supply chain isn’t elastic. People drink coffee all over the world, and maintaining the cycle of endless consumption is impossible without quality reduction. It’s a complex process: cultivate, harvest, process, roast, deliver. At each stage, there’s a risk, and there’s no transparency. We consume a pig in a poke. Roasting turns coffee beans into a standard product that obscures the raw material’s quality.

No need to talk much about mold. Mold is a carcinogen, a toxin for the body. The coffee trend won’t be allowed to stop, but there’s a chance that in the future, coffee will be viewed the same way cigarettes are now. Fifty years ago, cigarettes were ubiquitous; now, in most countries, smoking in public places is banned. The same will happen with coffee, I’m convinced.

Now I’ll explain how I quit coffee and how you can do it too. You need to gradually reduce caffeine consumption. I consumed 40 grams of coffee a day, gradually reduced the dose to 3 grams and switched to tea. Tea is an alternative because it has other ingredients that allow caffeine to not affect the body as strongly. I recommend oolongs and white tea.

Avoid caffeine-containing drinks. Use coffee as a stimulant at certain moments, before significant events, but only at the right time and knowing the dose. This is a deep topic, and the facts can seem strange, but there are studies you can look into. The consumer can’t always tell what’s good and what’s bad. Is it worth risking your health for dubious benefits? Get rid of the unnecessary, start thinking critically.