Coffee, Collective Consciousness and Death
I should probably preface this article with the sentiment that I am not a cynical person, as I am doing now, but after reading what follows, you may think, hmmm, this guy is a cynic, but as I just said, I’m not or rather I’d like to not be seen as cynic but rather, I have come to describe my new found desire to write as, observational commentary.
Today, I am going to share some thoughts on Coffee, Collective Consciousness and Death. Although the main thrust of this article is about collective consciousness, I will however link the idea of death and our cultural consumption of coffee into the current collective consciousness that exists in many parts of the world, thanks to the ever continuing ideological global unification of consumption.
Once a week or less, I meet up for a morning chat with a friend at Starbucks. I drive there but I I could bike to Starbucks in about 15 minutes. My friend bikes to the cafe because he lives nearer to it and he doesn’t own a car. He goes nearly every morning before work to write. To my astonishment, he can sit inside this relatively small Starbucks and write undeterred by all the comings and goings of the customers. The majority of customers that visit Starbucks drive, hence in my town, they will be moving to a bigger drive thru location. As the manager of the cafe told me, about seventy percent of people order and pay for their drinks through an Application on their phone, so they simply have to park, enter, grab and go. The drive thru will suit this kind of person perfectly.
As I sat talking with my friend I noticed this steady stream of customers, who walk in and out without paying or ordering. I commented to my friend “Does anybody sit and chat in a coffee shop anymore?” A nearby person who overheard this comment and who was filling up on sugar, commented “I don’t have the time.”
Previously, I had ordered a drink from the hard working friendly baristas, when not a minute after ordering, one of the baristas shouted “Working on your decaf latte Jay.” I looked at her perplexed “How come you have to tell me you’re working on my drink?” She responded with a wry smile “People are so impatient these days, we have to let them know we are working on their drink, to keep them relaxed.” It seems time is our most sought after commodity.
When I was young man, just after graduating college, my first experience of drinking coffee was in France. Sitting outside a cafe in Paris with some friends, we smoked rolled cigarettes and enjoyed a mid morning croque monsieur while testing each other’s intellect. It was a social affaire, a time to chat, enjoy each other’s company and maybe catch a few rays of sunshine, if we were lucky, on the cafe terrace. It signified a special time, a time to be and enjoy the moment, without a care in the world. A time to take things slow and enjoy the sights and sounds of whatever was going on around us, to meet people and discuss things. Today, I see mostly a steady stream of people, who don’t have time, polling up one after another, to buy coffee from baristas that are becoming more like machines. I wonder what has come of us.
Even though I meet my friend once a week at best, I often notice the same people each morning buying their coffee drinks, standing with their arms crossed, waiting for their drink to arrive. If like the person standing next to them their drink seems to be taking awhile to get there, they comment to each other about how slow it seems today, while the baristas seem to be working at a maniacal pace. An exertion of energy I wonder how long and to what personal detriment those baristas can keep going at before something negative happens to them.
As someone that is concerned about the environment, I also think about the amount of coffee cups being used every single day by fast food corporate entities such as Starbucks, not just in my neighborhood, but around the world. Cups which get used once, and then discarded by people that often buy the same drink every morning, five times a week. When you think of it in those terms, it’s staggering. A human being buying a coffee every morning, nearly twenty times a month, using twenty cups a month, possibly over a thousand cups a year. I don’t have the specific statistics on Starbucks, but they use close to three billion cups every year. Considering there are somewhere near eight billion people on the planet, that’s how can I put it, fucked up.
People no longer have the time to sit and drink coffee in the store, in one of those old fashioned things called ‘Mugs’. Who are the mugs now? On about three out of four occasions I order my drink in a traditional mug or cup. It’s an interesting affair, they often have to go in the back or look in the rear parts of a cub-bard to find that long forgotten object, a clay fired mug. Of course, I am making generalizations about society and coffee drinking. There are in my town a few coffee shops, maybe one in particular, where people predominantly sit drinking out of real cups, this is however the exception rather than the norm.
When you think about the amount of energy being used to consume one cup of coffee, its other worldly. First, the energy used by each customer to drive their car to the cafe. The energy used to grow the coffee beans. The oil used to transport the coffee to each Starbucks location. The electricity used to power the devices and buildings used to make and order coffee, from the phones to the lights, to the heating and air conditioning in the stores. The oil, paper and plastic products created to house that almost religious often revered watered product called, coffee. Let’s not forget the holes dug in the earth to put all the tons of trash created by every Starbucks, every single day of our lives. Yet, none of this seems to bother us. On we go, every day, doing the same thing, over and over. Using a cup, throwing it away, then repeating the next day, buy a coffee, using a cup, then throwing it away. So ingrained is this habit, it’s considered normal, yet, I don’t think that’s right or appropriate.
I don’t blame the consumer anymore, I blame Starbucks, and companies like them, for continuing to promote a culture of waste. They are a symbol of unconsciousness in collective consciousness gone mad. Their mission statement, as of April 8, 2019, reads "To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” I question how the human spirit will be doing when we are surrounded by endless used cups, suffocating in a waste stream of massive gargantuan proportions. Furthermore, the values read, firstly “Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome.” I’ll give them this, people do enjoy having a place to convene, study, use the bathroom, and most people seem welcome, as long as you have cash of course. Secondly, “Acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other.” Lovely, they certainly challenged the status quo, they changed it, but I don’t feel they changed it for the better, but that’s not an issue for them here. Thirdly, “Being present, connecting with transparency, dignity and respect.” Fourth, “Delivering our very best in all we do, holding ourselves accountable for results” and finally they state “We are performance driven, through the lens of humanity.”
It all sounds rather nice, but what is the outcome of these poignant words. Is the lens of humanity really being looked through. If you look at the situation, people are fine with spending money at these kinds of institutions, in fact it’s become a habit, a ritual. It’s part of our lives. Obviously coffee gives people that hit, that little spark to get them through the day. That sweet bit of sugar, that well known experience which is always there helping them experience another day in paradise. It’s not cheap though, unless you get a regular coffee, you are going to spend $4 and up every day on a drink. Five days a week that works out to nearly $25 a week, possibly a $100 a month on coffee, and every time you buy a drink you use another cup. Starbucks seem perfectly happy with this situation and so does society. The collective consciousness of our culture allows us to go on. Forward march!
Collective Consciousness is a subject that can be researched, analyzed and talked about in magazines and journals by researchers, professors and others who have a vocabulary and intellect one thousand percent better than mine. I don’t have the literacy clout to discuss this subject in an academic manner. I am sure others have studied the idea of collective consciousness in a systematic, peer reviewed process. I am not going to go into that kind of detail here. What I will give you is this statement from Wikipedia: Collective consciousness is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. The term was introduced by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his The Division of Labour in Society in 1893.
Since 1893, the idea has been developed, and if you wish you can read about it further on Wikipedia or elsewhere online. Hopefully, as I have tried to show through the current collective consciousness surrounding coffee drinking in our society, you get a taste for how collective consciousness works. There is a consciousness allowing people to participate in the behavior of drinking coffee at , corporations, institutions and conglomerates that promote a certain lifestyle or culture. While the shareholders reap the benefits and you could say the customers enjoy their coffee, our planet becomes a bigger trash heap, day by day, humanity in my opinion, suffers.
Alternatively, our collective consciousness could dictate that this style of life is not becoming of a society with the current understanding and knowledge we have at our disposal. As a humanity, a race, you could say we have evolved and learned a hell of a lot over the last few hundred years. We’ve flown to the moon, created wonder drugs, constructed sky scrapers, created the internet, and all manner of amazing things. We’ve learned a lot about the body, mind and our natural environment. Yet, collectively there are still ideologies and belief systems which seem outdated. Religions around the world promote the belief, without any solid proof, that when you die you go to heaven, well as long as you don’t sin, when maybe, just maybe, we already live in/on heaven. Maybe earth is heaven, and we should make our stand here, make it great, rather than waiting for some perfect place post life. If we had this collective consciousness maybe we would see how much of a non action the current style of mass coffee consumption is not fitting with the needs of humanity. Maybe we would look for other ways to create wealth, share products and do business.
Speaking of life after death, last week I went to a memorial for a friend who had committed suicide. Had she not spent the last six years recovering from being brutally attacked and beaten in the streets of Venice, California, she may still be here. The toll of having over twenty reconstructive surgeries, combined with the mental anguish, pain and suffering that accompanied all of that, may have been too much for her and she took her own life.
We used to talk on the phone, here and there. Sharing our war stories and picking each up. Sometimes, I felt like I was one of those people that she would call when she was really low, because she knew I could talk to her about the problems, the struggles, as I was experiencing them myself, as I understood. Sometimes I felt like I brought her back into this life, but two weeks before she took her own life, she called me and we played phone tag, and I was not able to speak with her before she died. I was not able to offer my assistance.
Her memorial, a rather long affair, for which I only lasted two hours but was scheduled for five, had lots of people getting up to share their feelings about her. Others performed music and dance, but most of the time was set aside for expressions. I’m not a regular memorial goer, I haven’t been to many in my life, but I assume as you get older you start going to more as the people you know around you start to leave this planet. One aspect of the proceedings that struck me as I sat there listening. As people got up to speak, they would often start their address by saying something along the lines of “I know she isn’t really dead, she is with us now, she’s in our hearts.” “She’s not really dead, she’s gone to a better place.” Or “She didn’t die, she lives on.” I understand this sentiment. I understand the feeling that someone never really leaves us, rather if you remember them, they are still with us, in our hearts.
Sometimes you remember people, after they have gone, without even trying to remember them. Maybe the location you first met or something a person brought you, reminds you of them. Maybe the village where you used to spend time with them or a social event you used to both attend, reminds you. There are many ways a person is remembered after they are gone. Yet, while I sat there and listened to one person after another get up and often start their address with “She’s not dead.” I wanted to stand up and say, “Yes she is dead, that’s why we are here, I get it, she’s in our hearts, but actually, physically, she’s dead. Can we agree on that please, because I don’t know how much I am into the idea of after life or life in heaven or hell. I would like to come to terms with her death, with her life, with the fact that she’s gone. I want to mourn, I want to remember her, I want to rejoice, I want to be thankful for knowing her. Each time someone gets up to speak and starts their remembrance with ‘I know she’s not dead’ I wonder whether I am at some kind of hippy dippy show or a memorial for someone who died. I wonder if I sit here long enough, I might start to adopt the collective consciousness that she’s not really dead. If we say it enough maybe it will become true. Lies become fact, such is the way of our current world. Yes, I know I’ve gone too far, but please can we be realistic. Can we accept our fate and rejoice in it, or do I have to believe in someone else’s ideology in order to survive in this world. She was a great, joyous, wonderful person, with so much fight, so much heart and she suffered, she suffered but she lived, and now she’s gone. She’s in my heart, I know what you mean but she’s actually gone. Can we agree on that?”
How should we deal with death? I am not saying people shouldn’t have the freedom to express themselves in this way, because death is hard to accept, hard to visualize and understand until it happens to someone you love. However, I do think the collective consciousness promotes a style, a way of looking at life, through religion, through rhetoric, which in turn creates ideologies which furthers a certain viewpoint on life and death. Much like the collective consciousness which drives our coffee consumption, so does it drive the way we view life and death and I don’t think I’m on board anymore. Are you?
As I finish this piece, I think about the kind of collective consciousness that attract me, that would bring a reality I would appreciate in my life. Although I did touch on this briefly, it’s a topic I will have to embellish further at a later date. For now, maybe like me, you have been made aware of the power of collective consciousness, it’s presence in our culture, the way we live and it’s effect on our continuing existence on this planet.