Written by Onur Solmaz

Khaled was really nervous that the goats would not stop defecating all around the farm and the shelter ground; it was the third time that it happened since last month, and his father had given him the hint of a thorough beating in case of a recurrence. Little black marbles covered a jagged line that stretched out all the way up to the pasture, now barely visible near the horizon, designating the path he and the goats took on their way home. Don’t get Khaled wrong, watching your step after the goats were done feeding had always been a part of the job—but this was beyond normal. It was as if the goats themselves had been possessed, and their lower halves had turned into unholy portals to hell, for the goats were shitting in unphysical quantities, and there was nothing he could do about it. It doesn’t add up, Khaled thought, the goat has an infinite capacity to defecate, regardless of the amount it eats—we should have bought sheep instead. Finishing that thought, he saw his father leave the house, his face red with anger, taking big strides at first, and then watching his step for goat shit as he drew closer. They had a passionate argument on whose fault it was, how it could be stopped, and decided that it was due to something that the goats ate.

The next day, Khaled took just two goats instead of the whole herd, and carried out an experiment. He would keep one of them from eating while allowing the other one, and watch it closely so that he can identify the culprit when the flood gates open. And the black wave came soon enough, after the goat had begun to eat from a tall bush decorated with red berries. Excited about his discovery, he collected a reasonable amount of the berries and hastily made his way back home to tell his dad about the red fruit that made the goats crap. “Good, then let’s keep them away from the bushes from now on”, his dad exclaimed, “and I will keep these for the next time I have difficulties in the outhouse”. Soon enough, not having eaten enough fiber, his dad did have difficulties in the outhouse, and made the then-dried berries and the beans therein into a paste. Upon ingesting said paste, Khaled’s father observed that not only it was easier to pass stool, but also that he was more energetic and he could stay awake all night. In the following months, he shared his discovery with nearby villagers, and started a trade business of the red fruit, which flourished as the fruit’s desirable traits became common knowledge.

I stand in the company kitchen roughly eleven centuries after Khaled’s discovery, watching a gray box chew coffee beans with its mechanical jaw and excrete diarrhea from its designated nozzle right into my mug. The display on the box expresses that a violent amount of beans have been sacrificed to create this cup of coffee, something like “triple shot quadruple espresso café crème, no sugar”, which I had come to require before I started the day’s work if I didn’t want to have a staring contest with my monitor. It was the time I had started writing my master’s thesis in an engineering company in Southwest Germany, and the first time I had a taste of corporate lifestyle. I was locked daily in an office full of Swabians who were obsessed with being perceived as hardworking, and my task was to stare at my monitor screen and push buttons so that desired shapes and symbols appeared on it. But I also had to think very fast and push the buttons even faster, and sometimes write on paper before I pushed the buttons, all of which proved to be arduous tasks—at least if I wanted to be done with the thesis in just six months as specified. Spoiler alert, it took a lot longer than that.

When I first started drinking daily, I liked coffee because it helped me concentrate, and dramatically shortened the period of time I had to spend in the toilet. Another thing I grew to notice back then was that literally everyone loved coffee. If it were like in the olden times, coffee surely would have had an associated deity, like Dionysus for wine. Some people actually worship coffee, call it the nectar of the gods and assume that it makes them superhuman. These people generally invest a lot of time, money and effort into optimizing their caffeinic pleasure, by reading articles about coffee, importing special beans and buying lots of expensive equipment to squirt water through said beans with just the right amount of pressure.

There is a very valid reason for this obsession with coffee—it is that the Western governments are retarded. When they first discovered coffee (or tea), they drank lots of it, became hyperactive, just couldn’t sit down for one minute, and went on to colonize the rest of the world. The basis of Western imperialism? Too much caffeine. Tea is pretty much the same thing if you consume too much, and you know it because the Brits loved their tea. Caffeine has been at the essence of corporate culture ever since the establishment of first modern companies, namely the British and Dutch East India Companies. Life should have been as easy as eating the things that grew on the ground—but now, because of coffee, you have to push buttons all day long so that somebody else can pick it up from the ground and put it in the supermarket for you. You bash your hands against buttons to fill little plastic rectangles with bigger numbers, which you then use at the supermarket to receive food—that is progress.

In the meanwhile, everybody continues to drink coffee, and feel this urge to go, to move forward, to run without knowing the destination. It is mass insanity at its finest, and the bad thing is you know that it wouldn’t make a difference if you removed coffee out of the equation—people would just replace it with cocaine or garlic bread or something. “Why are we running?” “BECAUSE, PROGRESS.” “Where are we running to?” “I DON’T KNOW, ISN’T IT EXCITING!?”

I could even proceed further to claim that caffeine is the metaphorical whip the capitalist system uses to squeeze every little drop of work out of the enslaved individual, but that would take all the fun out of the conversation. And the funniest thing is that people don’t even dare to insult coffee, or associate it with anything negative, because they are afraid of not being able to satisfy their addiction. Once you understand the true nature of caffeine addiction, the “scientific” articles enumerating the benefits of coffee start to sound even more stupid: it increases your IQ, strengthens your arteries, turns your balls into steel… People can’t seem to shut up about its advantages, and criticizing coffee has become taboo to a degree that makes you question whether the government has really issued a legal ban for it.

But really, what kind of work justifies ingesting a psychoactive substance? Is it really so important to finish that one presentation before the group meeting, that it justifies staying up all night and drinking eight cups of coffee? Why can’t we just admit failure in the workplace, and why are we made to believe that each and every one of us are totally replaceable? When our internal battery dies, why do we question ourselves first, and not the quality and the quantity of the work we have been made responsible for? Work never ends, and the individual must have the power to draw the line—but coffee disempowers the individual by removing the ability of knowing when to stop.

My personal experience with coffee has lasted ten months and been as dramatic and emotionally loaded as the preceding few paragraphs. I can summarize my current stance against coffee thus: It is really curious how we can justify any habit once it becomes socially accepted and easily attainable. It is really difficult to antagonize such a habit when no one dares to speak bad about it. In this case, I volunteer to be that voice: Fuck coffee! It is OK not wanting to have it, and you don’t have to have it. You and your brain alone are capable enough to do any work that is presented to you; and if you can’t, it is the task’s fault, not yours. The learning curve should adapt to the individual, not the other way around. Because coffee makes you:

• nervous,
• excitable,
• addicted,
• stiff,
• unable to think clearly,
• unable to sleep regularly.

Coffee also brings out the potential for chronic depression, which many workers of our age suffer from. Life’s problems are already hard to cope with, and being high on caffeine all the time doesn’t help.

Mahmoud’s eyes were fixed on the cup on the table, his face uneasy, not paying any attention to the conversation that filled the room during the gathering. The most important people of the region have gathered in this very room, including the foremost tribe chiefs, traders and military leaders. The meeting was called for hastily, and it was about something that required their immediate attention: the rumors were true. Months ago, they had received word that the ummah was mobilizing soldiers based in Qahira to put an end to the monopoly on trade of coffee and other local goods. That meant that the empire had finally decided to control it directly instead of having to depend on local traders. And the rumors were confirmed when the army was spotted by a scout, camping at ten days’ distance—that was eight days ago. And that morning, they saw black smoke start rising behind the mountain: the neighboring village was lost.

Everybody in the room feared for his life except Mahmoud—he was indifferent. Unbeknownst to Mahmoud, he was a descendant of Khaled the goatherd who had discovered coffee. The small trade his ancestor started flourished into a family business, switched bases from village to town as the family itself climbed the social ladder through newer generations. An emir and ruler of the biggest coffee plantations in Yemen, Khaled’s descendant was pondering his fate with remarkable equanimity. It was true that nothing could stand in the khalifa’s way, and it was true that he did not have the right to abandon his brethren. There was a remote possibility of negotiating with the fariq of the army, but he concluded there would be no opportunity for that either, seeing the fate of the neighboring village.

That night, Mahmoud went to sleep knowing that his fate would be decided tomorrow. Most of the townsfolk who heard the news had already fled, and the ones who hadn’t, stayed out of principle and responsibility. The ones who remained were paralyzed in terror, afraid of what might become of them. Mahmoud was able to keep his cool, because he knew more than anything that panic has no use if one doesn’t possess the ability to affect the outcome of a situation… And it was also the case that Mahmoud suffered a severe case of caffeine addiction in his youth, having drunk several cups per day since he was a child, up to a degree that he permanently damaged his nervous system following a stroke, after which he quit drinking. The list of things that could stimulate or even impress Mahmoud was pretty short, since that part of his brain was irreversibly fried—and it didn’t help no matter how much he pleaded to god that he would never indulge in what he traded again.

So when the bloodthirsty soldiers invaded the town with war cries, collected everyone who pertained to the administration—including Mahmoud—and started beheading one by one, he was not surprised, not just because he was not able to, but also that he was the only one who could see the big picture, and his place in the machine. This coffee that he traded, and the substance therein changed humans without them noticing—it was more sinister than opium, because instead of mindless euphoria, it bestowed its consumer an agitated mind and delusions of grandeur. This was surely the thing wars would be fought over, and it would always be there until the end of civilization, dragging people away from the organic spectrum of human experience, and throwing them into a machine-like state, running indefinitely towards an invisible destination.