Thu, 6 Mar 2025
I wake at 4:30a. My alarm welcomes me to the day as gently as is possible for an alarm to do. My very first action is to hit snooze. My second action is to drink a plant-based, caffeine-heavy preworkout energizer. I catch a few more minutes of rest while I wait for the caffeine to kick in.
This is my typical morning routine: I down some caffeine, get a few extra winks, and then I'm typically up and moving about between 4:45a and 5:10a. Depending on the day, I will usually either get outside and put some miles under me, or I'll do a little strength training at the gym before work.
This routine keeps me grounded. I relish my wakefulness in the hours before anyone else is up. The time allows me a lengthy runway into the day. This routine also hinges on the use of caffeine; the energy drink is not an optional component of my morning ritual. I'm a natural night owl. It's easy for me to remain awake well past 1:00a if left to my own circadian devices, but given the way our mainstream social structures are set up, such a sleep cycle is an untenable proposition for me.
I thus rely on caffeine to support a mode of living that uplifts my general wellbeing.
In the days of my youth, I held a great deal of disdain for caffeine. This attitude was borne of incredible amounts of unexamined privilege and an air of moral superiority that is laughably naive in hindsight.
I was uncomfortable with the notion of dependence. I saw how others needed their coffee to function, and I looked down on them for it. I saw it in the same way I saw any other chemical dependency, from cigarettes to alcohol to heroine. I thought of it as a bandage papering over a personal moral failure, a lack of discipline, a dearth of willpower.
Ironically, my morning routine looked similar then to what it is now. I would get up at exactly 4:44a (because 4 is the most aesthetically pleasing single digit to me) and then I would do my pre-run routine (which hypocritically contained the very same preworkout energizer I use to this day, but because it wasn't coffee and was for the purposes of physical exercise, I rationalized the caffeine content as incidental rather than functional; good for me, not for thee, apparently).
I have also gotten down on myself when I look back on the consistent stability of my former routine. My quality of life was never better than it was during that brief period. It’s easy to forget that it was also a singular moment in time that cannot be replicated: I had no job, an incredibly low cost of living, and enough savings to carry me for a relatively indefinite period of unemployment before I would really need to worry.
Expecting myself to have the same routine I had before I was shackled by student loans, before I had full time employment, before I had adult responsibilities, is unreasonable. And expecting that my relationships to things like caffeine can or should be different than they are isn't a worthwhile endeavor.
In those halcyon days of circa 2014, I had the gift of unstructured time and a wildly privileged lack of obligations or responsibility. My current lifestyle, given the constraints of the society in which I happen to live, requires of me some caffeine consumption. I'm okay with that.
And anyway, we've all apparently decided that caffeine is one chemical dependency we're socially okay with.
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Speaking of chemicals, caffeine is only one half of the equation for me. Up until recently, I had ritualistic bookends to my day: one to ease me into wakefulness, and one to force me into sleep. Whereas I would begin my days with caffeine, I would end my days with cannabis.
For time in memorial, I have struggled to fall asleep. Once I'm asleep, I struggle to wake up. I'm a less a creature of habit and more a creature of inertia. Upon returning to Washington State after living in Florida for a year, I discovered cannabis and found it to be profoundly helpful in the act of falling asleep.
The initial appeal was no different than any other stoner, but after the novelty wore off, weed was just an ordinary part of daily life. The primary benefit I derived from it was twofold: 1) it helped me shortcut the process of winding down after a challenging day of working in customer service, where I was consistently dipping into social, emotional, and cognitive deficits, and 2) it dramatically quickened the process of falling asleep once my head hit the pillow.
This arrangement was helpful and supportive for a few years. Over time, though, the cannabis turned into a chore, devoid of any mindfulness or intentionality. I would get home and toke up, simply because that's what I did when I got home.
And something they don't tell you about chronic cannabis use is its lingering cloudiness, a mental fog that creeps into your consciousness when you're not high. For me at least, that fog descended over the vibrancy of my waking conscious experience. I also began experiencing more pervasive social anxiety, whether I was high or not.
As well, while cannabis certainly helps in the process of falling asleep, it inhibits quality sleep. I spent less time awake, but not more time recuperating (which was a Faustian bargain I needed to make at the time).
Ultimately, the dynamics of my life changed to an extent that cannabis was no longer useful for me. I continued using it for sleep, but increasingly wanted to eliminate it from my daily routine.
Interestingly, while I am absolutely chemically dependent on caffeine, I was never chemically dependent on cannabis. The difficulty I had in desisting its use had more to do with the anxiety of being unable to sleep than anything else. So for both caffeine and cannabis, then, the dependency itself is and was not the issue. It was the context and impact of their respective uses.
I have no issues with the fact that I'm chemically dependent on caffeine any more than I'm upset about the fact that I have to eat every single day, even though I already ate yesterday. At the same time, even though I wasn’t chemically dependent on cannabis, it caused me issues that were worth addressing, so I addressed them. My sleep has never been better.
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Particularly here in the US, we have an aversion to the idea that we might depend on someone or something. One of our founding documents is literally called the Declaration of Independence. Many (or most) of us have a libertarian streak, irrespective of where we land on any political spectrums. Our ideals of rugged self-reliance fall apart rapidly when subjected to even the gentlest of logical scrutiny, but we nevertheless find ourselves seduced by the notion that others are complimentary rather than necessary.
This aversion to dependency—even as an abstract concept—makes perfect sense for us. Consider our origins: the colonial settlers who would eventually establish the United States were, famously, Puritans. The seeds of our distinctly American brand of boostraps individualism can be traced to the puritanical ethic of "if any would not work, neither should he eat" and all the accompanying shame that ethic entails. With that in mind, apply the (ironically named) concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions and the social evolution our individualistic culture is fairly obvious in retrospect.
In part because of this puritanical shame, we overemphasize individuality and adopt a guiding ethos of personal responsibility in all things, even where that also means we must downplay or forget the ways in which we are inescapably interdependent upon one another. Cue the libertarian self-made man bemoaning taxation as theft while driving on a public roadway in a car he didn’t assemble to a job he’s doing in service of another’s bottom line all so he can make enough money to feed his family with food he didn’t grow in a house he didn’t build.
I am not immune to the cognitive dissonance of self-reliant individualism. I have a distinct aversion to projects that necessitate other people. This is not because I have a misanthropic aversion to other people as such, but because I find the process of achieving alignment in goals and values to be an infinitely more complex proposition when another autonomous person is in the mix. The dissonance of this aversion shows up in multiple ways, but the two most personally illustrative for me are in music and in romance.
I love playing music, or more specifically, I love singing. It's something I do on my own irrespective of any other circumstances that may be ongoing, but when you're really clicking with another musician or singer in real time, it’s a singularly wonderful sonic and sensory experience that is difficult to adequately describe with words. It’s one of humanity’s truly transcendent experiences.
Similarly, I love my own company, almost to a fault. I am perfectly happy when left to my own devices. In fact, the feeling of being perceived at all introduces a low-grade anxiety that hums in the background (or foreground, depending on who the perceiver might be, or what aspects of me they’re perceiving), and that anxiety persists for as long as that perception is possible.
At the same time, I’m also subject to the very human need to be known, understood, and loved. We are a social species, so even though I thoroughly enjoy being on my own, I'm also consistently lonely. It's a pervasive loneliness that is always near at hand. It's of the sort that can be allayed only in the context of a romantic relationship.
The push/pull of these and other social dynamics are areas in which I am growing (and have lots of room yet to grow). Seeing them in myself has me seeing parallels elsewhere.
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I'm concerned by our collective hypernormalization and what that portends for a potential fundamental social breakdown, both in the abstract and in the practical. For example, what if the grid goes down and I’m left without power or clean water? I could initially handle such a catastrophe by myself in the short term with the tools and natural resources I have at my disposal, but I would certainly not last long in an indefinite capacity. If such a situation were prolonged, I have no survival skills that would help me survive on my own.
Then again, neither does anyone else.
Oh, sure, some of us will be better at staying alive during a complete breakdown in public infrastructure than others, but what is survival without community? From my vantage, if the extent to which one's survival simply means staying alive, it is nothing more than delayed extinction.
Postponed suicide is not prevented suicide. Delayed extinction is not survival.
The platitudinal phrase “It takes a village” might be trite as an expression, but it is no less an accurate statement of fact. Homo sapiens is a social species that arose to global prominence not in spite of its collective social interdependencies, but because of them.
Dependency is not a dirty word. It’s the object and effect of the dependency that matters rather than dependency as such. Just as my relationship to caffeine is one of chemical dependence and my relationship to cannabis was one of anxious dependence, the former is currently supportive while the latter was destructive.
Our individualism is to the body politic as cannabis was to my mental health: initially helpful, but eventually damaging. We must now turn toward each other, even in fear and trembling, or catastrophe will be our birthright, cataclysm the inheritance we leave posterity.
We need others; we need community. This sounds simplistic and elementary, but in our current political climate and the state of our technological echo chambers, what does community really mean? We wrap ourselves in protective insularity like a blanket keeping the icy chill of complexity and discomfort at bay. Our resistance to exploring the (admittedly terrifying) black box of human experiences not our own keeps us trapped in the isolating and lonely grip of suffocating individualism.
Community will necessarily look different for each of us. While humans are universally social, we are anything but a monolith. Discovering what community means for each of us is a key ingredient in repairing our damaged social fabric. And it starts with the individual recognizing they need the collective.
We may be liberated alone, but we can only be free together.