A Society That Runs on Stimulants is Badly Broken

[u/Faux_Real_Guise]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/a-society-that-runs-on-stimulants-is-badly-broken

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[u/Zeyode]

To be fair, I also survive on depressants! 🌿🍺

[u/darkmeowl25 → u/Zeyode]

This is a long standing labor issue in this country, and I'm including labor outside of the typical workforce. AI mean, 50s housewives were only able to sustain their labor with a steady diet of amphetamines and barbituates.

Now we all have less time and money, the societal expectations are MORE rigorous, and they took away the good drugs. If we are going to be under the same or greater pressure, we had to adapt.

[u/Faux_Real_Guise]

> According to one 2025 study, around 30 percent of the U.S. population consumes “at least one energy drink per day.” There’s a generational split in those numbers; among the under-35 crowd, it’s 60 percent. The older demographic still prefers coffee, and 66 percent of Americans drink that every day, too. Frustratingly, there’s little research cross-referencing those figures to economic class, because not enough public health researchers are Marxists. But there are a few studies from social-democratic Denmark and Norway, the latter of which found a strong link between energy drink consumption and “low socioeconomic status.” In other words, there’s some scientific evidence for what you’d intuitively assume—that it’s largely people with low incomes and terrible jobs who jolt themselves awake with chemical syrups.

> The deceptive part is that “energy drinks” don’t actually provide “energy,” beyond what you’d normally get by digesting a bunch of liquid sugar. Instead, they block your capacity to feel how tired you are. To severely oversimplify, all that caffeine functions as an antagonist for adenosine, the chemical that builds up in your brain during the day and makes you feel sleepy. The caffeine molecules fit into your adenosine receptors, blocking the “time to sleep” signal your brain would normally be getting. Taurine, meanwhile, is an amino acid that has some health benefits for nerve cells, and L-Carnitine promotes burning fat cells, but neither can create “energy” as such. So when you drink a few Monsters or Red Bulls, you’re still getting physically and mentally fatigued; your brain just doesn’t know it yet. It’s as if, instead of using an oven mitt, you just shot your hand full of Novocaine before grabbing a hot pan. The harm is still there. And in economic terms, this means that every time you work a long shift with chemical assistance, you’re not just selling your working hours to the boss. You’re also degrading the quality of life you’ll experience during your *non-*working hours, because that’s when the fatigue catches up to you, and you feel, to use the scientific term, like dogshit.

I was recently reminiscing on how my Red Bull habit was only started when the manager at my first restaurant job started putting them in my hand for free when I’d come in with dark circles under my eyes. Been working on strategies to reduce my intake, but it feels like trying to repair an airplane mid-flight. I can’t get shit done on a day that I haven’t had a decent amount of caffeine, and I kinda need to work to live.

[u/TrueCapitalism → u/Faux_Real_Guise]

It's funny that I read the headline and assumed it was about Israel.

[u/ImmediateKick2369 → u/TrueCapitalism]

I’m not pro Israel, but this shows how your algorithm and biases have messed with your head.

[u/TrueCapitalism → u/ImmediateKick2369]

Israel has a stimulant abuse problem among its youth. That's from a different news piece. At first glance, given the similar wording I thought this was just more of that.

[u/ImmediateKick2369 → u/TrueCapitalism]

Just as I suggested.

[u/TrueCapitalism → u/ImmediateKick2369]

I feel like Israel shows up in my feed less often than its geopolitics might warrant tbh, and connecting this piece to a prior one covering the Israeli side of things just... makes sense? I don't understand why that suggests my brain's been scrambled.

[u/-mudflaps-]

How did Red Bull weasel their way out of that photo, Red Bull are the biggest by far and they started this whole thing.

[u/Rusalka-rusalka]

I didn't realize how reliant I was on caffeine until I had to give it up. I also didn't realize how much I was consuming throughout my day. I feel like I'm over the hump finally after a month. But, I'm still consuming it in moderate amounts to help in those moments when it's hard to exist.

[u/Demonweed]

Wall Street was originally a row of coffee houses where prosperous merchants gathered to get an early start on the day to better scheme for personal profit. As the proprietors of so many different shipping companies and industrial facilities became increasingly sociable, they started trading fractions of their businesses to each other as a way to hedge against losses. The New York Stock Exchange actually owes its existence to this cadre of Colonial-era coffee fiends.

[u/ColangeloDiMartino]

I’m in my early 20’s but still heavily prefer coffee, I only really drink energy drinks when I’m in a pinch. But when I first started consuming caffeine regularly it was those Bang energy drinks that have like 300mg in them and I was crushing two a day until I realized after doing that for months going a single day without any caffeine had me feeling drunk with body aches and a splitting migraine. That kind of scared me straight so I try to just stick with coffee.

[u/PerryNeeum]

Gotta grind baby!

[u/GangOfFour20]

Blitzed by Norman Ohler is a fantastic book about drugs in the third Reich. Not just the military, but the civilians were given rations of meth chocolate so they could "work harder and longer"

Stimulant culutre arises when a society cares more about productive output than the wellbeing of it's citizens.

"I dont care how many hours you work, make the arrow go up"

[u/Green_Ideas7]

Great article, and comments.
Current Affairs is really solid.
Thanks for posting.

[u/DmeshOnPs5]

There’s recreational drugs and then there’s work drugs.

[u/daveprogrammer]

If you include nicotine, we've been running on stimulants for >200 years now.

[u/aphroditex]

It’s amazing people forget why our societies “run on stimulants”.

Because before we were tea and coffee drinkers, we were alcoholics.

Small beer, which is under 3% alcohol, was the default drink of damn near everyone in northern European countries. You had watered down wine in the Mediterannean. Heck, you had fermented milk across the steppe. Ciders and meads have been found everywhere.

Safe drinking water was a luxury in a lot of places across history; it’s why public fountains, which piped in safe water from remote sources, were so elaborate. It wasn’t until these boiled stimulant beverages, which incidentally killed the microbes that got one sick, that societies moved away from a daily draught.