The Dangerous Allure of Mid-Afternoon Coffee

“I’m so delicious, mwahaha”

2:00pm. That’s when the thoughts start to creep in.

“Hmm. I’m starting to feel a bit tired.”

“Y’know, just a little more energy would help me power through the rest of this day.”

“I mean, just a small cup of coffee will do the trick.”

And that’s usually all it takes; all I need to hear to break open those grounds and brew another cup.

Such is the dangerous allure of mid-afternoon coffee.

Of course, come 11:00pm, when I’m still somehow wired from a 12oz mug of coffee, I will regret having made and consumed more caffeine. I will tell myself, “Idiot! Now you can’t go to sleep.” And the next night, when I will once again have made a mid-afternoon serving of coffee, I will admonish myself more. And the next night, I’ll do it again.

The problem is that this desire for an afternoon energy jolt stems from a good place. I want to be productive. I want to be responsible. I want to accomplish things and grow as an individual, and coffee will surely help me do this.

Except oftentimes it doesn’t. Instead, I’ll spend the majority of the rest of the day loping from one activity to the next, some ostensibly worthwhile, others manifestly not. Most of these tasks will go incomplete, or barely even begin.

The reason for this is that at 2:00pm I don’t, in fact, lack energy.

What I lack is purpose.

In the first half of the day, I generally do a good job of taking care of my errands and tasks. I’m a pretty responsible human. But by the early afternoon I’m usually not sure what to do with myself. I lack direction. This leads to too much leisure time. Reading a book, playing a video game, watching Netflix: these are my fallbacks.

But when I do these for too many days in a row I start to feel pretty lousy. “I need to be more productive!” I tell myself.

And what stems from productivity, in my mind? Coffee!

But that’s a lie.

I don’t need coffee.

I need purpose.

That’s what we all need if we want to become our best selves.