Resilience #016

Epicurus and coffee

Hello, and welcome again to Every Dawn, where every workday I try to give you some thought that perhaps can accompany you throughout the day. I have my coffee here, and today, as I was looking at the coffee, it occurred to me what a complex thing this is and how difficult it is to get this coffee to me, to where I live.

I think I mentioned it a few days ago. You know, you have to think of the farmer who planted this coffee somewhere, perhaps in South America, and then there's a ship, and there is a captain, and there are all sorts of seamen, and there is a shipping company, and there is a shipping container, and there are harbor workers, and there's the packaging of the coffee in a factory, and then all these machines that we need so that the coffee arrives here. Then, there's a truck bringing it to the supermarket, or the people in the supermarket who sell it. I buy it, but then I need more machinery to grind it; I need more machines to actually make this coffee, and all these machines need electricity; the electricity has to be produced, and so on.

And all this, only for me to have this one coffee. And what is the problem with this? Obviously, there are two problems or two kinds of areas that are problematic.

The first is the obvious one with the cost of this coffee, not only to me but to the world. This coffee has a lot of hidden costs which we don't think about. The suffering of the farmer who earns a few cents per kilo of coffee, where I have to pay dollars and dollars, you know, to get a bag of coffee. Coffee is very expensive relatively speaking, but almost none of that goes to the farmer; it all goes to these middlemen, and to the supermarkets, and to the people who are shipping it around. So, there is a suffering involved in the coffee. Then, there is the environmental cost of transporting coffee from South America to China where I live. China doesn't grow any coffee, so it must all be imported. There's a huge environmental cost for these containers and these ships, and all the people who work on them. Then, there are the machines that we need, the cars, and ships, and coffee grinders, and coffee machines. All these machines need to be constructed. After a few years, they will be obsolete; they will have to be destroyed, again, most of the time not recycled but end up in some landfill. So, this coffee has this huge environmental cost attached to it and human cost attached to it.

That's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is more personal, and it is more subtle. Perhaps you don't think of it in the first moment: It is my dependency on this chain of things that brings the coffee here. It is a loss of my ability to be free and autonomous because I cannot bring about this coffee. I don't have the power to make, to create coffee. I cannot plant it. I cannot harvest it. I cannot grind it myself. I cannot make this coffee. I cannot transport it. I can do nothing — as long as I'm drinking the coffee and as long as I need it, I'm voluntarily making myself into a slave of this system that brings the coffee to me and enables me to drink it. But I am dependent on this system. Now, I am not self-sufficient; I'm not self-sustaining; I am not powerful; I'm dependent. And self-sufficiency is a feeling that, you know, the so-called prepper movement is trying to cultivate, and although I don't agree with the prepper movement and with their goals, which are often very strange, in my opinion, but what they do get right, I think, is that we lose something when we give up our power to create things ourselves. It is important for the human soul to feel empowered, and I don't feel empowered if I am at the end of a huge chain of dependencies, like a baby, you know, sucking the milk out of a baby bottle, and the baby itself has no power to do anything about it. It needs the bottle to be supplied; it needs the milk to be warmed up; it would die if it didn't have people doing all this to it, to serve it. And I imagined that I would be much more empowered and much more satisfied with my life if I had more the feeling that I can actually do something for myself.

I have tried to make these changes to some extent in my life. For example, instead of buying bread, I'm now always making my own bread. In our family, we only eat bread that we make ourselves. Of course, we still have to buy the flour; we still have to buy whatever else goes into the bread; we still have to buy the oil; we still have to buy the salt. We cannot make these things, but even taking control of one step gives you a feeling of empowerment. Now, when I make bread, I decide how much I make, what it will taste like, what kind of bread I want, and I'm not dependent on some big companies and supermarkets to give me this packaged piece of tasteless styrofoam that they call bread. I can make my own exactly as I like it.

And the same is true of coffee. For a while, I explored alternatives to it. I have on my balcony a pot that grows mint, and with this mint, I can make a tea. I can make an infusion that doesn't require anything but the mint and some hot water, and this is a very enabling, empowering feeling that I can create this mint infusion, this mint tea for myself, completely from my own ability to do it. It's in my own power. I can plant this thing, which needs nothing except two shovels of dirt and some seeds, and I can keep the seeds for later. I can keep creating new mint out of cuttings. So, after an initial donation of a seed or an initial cutting, it needs water, it needs some sunshine, we have these things, it needs some fertilizer. I can use whatever old food I have rotting and stick it into the soil to give it some fertilizer. It doesn't need anything else; it will grow by itself perfectly happily, and to make a drink out of it, I just need to cut off the leaves, bring them into my kitchen, heat up some water—even without electricity, even without civilization, I would be able somehow to make a fire and boil some water—and then I have my tea.

And this is such a great feeling. This is my tea. This is not something where I depend on thousands of people to make it possible for me to have it, but I can have it here and now, and I will have it even if civilization collapses. My cup of tea will always be there, while this coffee may not.

And this is actually what the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was saying.

Epicurus is often seen as somebody who advocated enjoyments and pleasures, but in reality, his concern was, how can we have pleasures that we cannot lose? How can we be certain of the things that give us happiness? And this is how this relates to my coffee and to the mint infusion: that I can only be certain not to lose the one of the two, which is the mint infusion because this I make myself; this depends only on me, while the coffee is not really mine. It depends on all these people who make it available to me, and I can lose it at any time. And we saw with COVID how easy it is to lose access to things.

Thank you, and see you next time!