Stimulation Nation: Part Two
Fake energy drinks are compatible with the modern lifestyle because the modern lifestyle is itself a form of slow violence against the human nervous system. We are all competing to go faster, think sharper, produce more, sleep less. And most of what we call normal life is profoundly unnatural. Sitting indoors all day under fluorescent lighting, breathing recirculated air, staring at right-angled walls, cut off from sunlight, from birdsong, from the sound of moving water, from any contact with the natural world. This is not how the human animal was designed to operate. And when you push any animal past its design limits, it starts looking for something to keep it upright.
This is not new. In the Andes, people have chewed coca leaves for hundreds of years to sustain hard physical labor at altitude. Indigenous cultures around the world have used plant compounds to sharpen night vision, extend endurance, push through exhaustion when survival demanded it. The difference is context. Those were specific tools for specific demands, used by people who also rested, who also moved through nature, who also had lives structured around recovery. What we are doing is different. We are stimulating constantly, with no recovery built in, treating a stress response as a lifestyle.
The Western world is only now, in the last decade or so, beginning to grapple seriously with a concept called nervous system regulation. For most of modern history this was the exclusive vocabulary of neuroscientists, and even they struggled to translate it into something ordinary people could use. But the idea is simple. Being human requires a delicate and continuous balance between stimulation and rest, between going out to get things and coming back to recover. That balance is not optional. It is biological. And we have spent the last fifty years systematically destroying it, then selling people canned stimulants to paper over the damage.
These drinks are not junk food alternatives. They are the new junk food. Laboratory engineered, graphically designed, influencer marketed, sports-sponsored products built on one of the oldest tricks in the book: make a person feel like Superman and they will assume they are doing something healthy. It is an unconscious contract between manufacturer and consumer. The manufacturer is thinking about margins. The consumer is thinking about hacks. And this is not a hack. This is throwing cow dung into the gas tank of a Ferrari and wondering why the engine is making that sound.
The core problem is that we are reacting instead of planning. Instead of asking, how much energy and stimulation do I actually need to get through my week, how do I structure my sleep, my food, my movement, my recovery so that I arrive at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday with something left in the tank, we are grabbing a can. Sixteen ounces or more of high-octane caffeine, often with refined sugar riding along, producing two to three hours of artificial alertness followed by a crash that is reciprocal and equal to the spike. So you grab another one. And the loop continues.
There is also something nobody talks about on the label. Carbonation. Most of these drinks are carbonated, partly to make the taste more palatable, partly because carbonation creates a sensation of intensity that the body reads as potency. But carbonated beverages are injected with carbon dioxide, which is the very substance your body is trying to expel every time you exhale. CO2 buildup in the body contributes to fatigue, muscle cramping, and that heavy, foggy feeling you are probably drinking the can to escape.* You are paying five dollars or more to ingest the waste product your lungs are working to remove. That is not a hack. That is the opposite of a hack. That is a con with bubbles.
The people selling you this understand your psychology better than you do. They know you are overwhelmed. They know you are behind. They know you are desperate for something that makes the gap between what you need to do and what you have the capacity to do feel smaller. They are not trying to close that gap. They are monetizing it. Every crash you experience is not a bug in their business model. It is the feature. The crash is what brings you back.
Stop buying it. Tell someone why. That is not an agenda. That is just what is true.
*When you drink a carbonated beverage, some of the CO2 is released in the stomach and expelled through burping. But a portion is absorbed through the gastrointestinal lining back into the bloodstream. The body then has to buffer (neutralize) that additional CO2 load, primarily through the bicarbonate system, to maintain blood pH. This is not catastrophic in small amounts, but it is the opposite of what your respiratory system is constantly working to do, which is offload CO2 and bring in oxygen. The irony is real and it is worth stating plainly: you are drinking a substance that adds to the very waste your lungs are trying to remove.