I Have A Caffeine Dependency

I have a caffeine dependency. It’s not something that I’m proud of, but it’s a fact. It distinguishes itself from an addiction because I need caffeine, but I don’t necessarily want it. It keeps me awake and alert at my job. I usually stick with caffeinated energy drinks – sugar free, of course, in a somewhat futile to keep my physical health in check. My main energy drink of choice used to be Red Bull, which tasted like battery acid and yet was also not entirely unpleasant. However, I have since switched to Monster Energy as my drink of choice, due to its more appealing range of flavours. Ultra Rosa is definitely my favourite flavour, followed by Ultra Fiesta Mango and Zero Ultra. Ultra Paradise is probably the worst flavour I’ve tried so far. And Ultra Watermelon belongs in its own non-Euclidean category for being a truly transcendent experience that left me feeling spiritually tainted inside afterwards.

I tell people that I work in IT, and this is technically true, but only because my job involves sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours each shift. In reality, a more accurate description of my job would be “community management”, which involves taking screenshots of mean comments on social media for several large companies. This is already tedious enough on its own, but my company offers 24/7 monitoring, which means that I often find myself working at midnight to the crack of dawn, or from the crack of dawn until midday, or from the late afternoon until midnight. Rather than working from home, as many IT jobs typically allow, my job requires me to work in an office. This policy allegedly gives my company a competitive advantage over other businesses of a similar nature, because it prevents employees from storing potentially sensitive client data on our personal devices. Caffeine has became a necessary method of coping with the disruptions to my sleep schedule.

In her book The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet, the Irish journalist Roisin Kiberd recalls her own experiences with caffeinated energy drinks and the IT industry. She describes Monster Energy as something that “is consumed in haste, by desperate people, who don’t dare to read the packaging too closely. Its appeal transcends its function as refreshment, or even as a source of sugar and caffeine and taurine and 220 mostly empty calories. Monster speaks to a world in which we require super-normal energy inputs to survive an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption, work and consumption, work and consumption.” At its fundamental core, the existence of Monster Energy “is our mortal attempt to add hours to the day, to bolster the body against its own will to give up. Against the city, against machines, and against nature, which feels more alien to us every day.”

During a typical work cycle, “I tell myself that I need Monster Energy to finish a deadline. It takes away doubt. It makes reality sparkle. Starry-eyed, shaking, my mind becomes a hive of bees, my heartbeat an ill-mannered rattle. I want to write everything at once, my hands typing almost as fast as my thoughts. […] But Monster is also the route to anxiety, to unfocused thoughts and unfinished sentences. It makes the screen too bright. It gives me a headache. Then the feeling sets in; nausea, like a claw reaching down my throat, into hollowness.” Kiberd asks: “What am I drinking Monster Energy for? I’m looking for refreshment, and clarity of mind, yet when I think about it, Monster Energy very rarely delivers either. It does give me confidence – or perhaps only energy, masquerading as confidence – enough to make my fingers dance over the laptop keys. […] It hurls its consumer into the future, automating the body while the mind falls into a stupor.”

Kiberd describes the process of buying Monster Energy as feeling “vaguely illicit, like I am buying something dangerous, a product certainly not meant for girls.” Monster Energy reflects “centuries of fear and machismo, and men seeking a cure for their own humanity. Monster Energy gives form to questions explored in horror and science fiction: the threat to the human body posed by urbanisation, industry, technology and capitalism. It conflates ‘monstrousness’ with the will to carry on.” She observes “something grim about the empty Monster Energy cans in the bin beside my desk. They speak of a dependence, not on some glamorous illicit substance, but on the rough product of centuries of fragile masculinity left unchecked, fermenting in a hyperbolic brew.”

In retrospect, the allegedly masculine connotations of Monster Energy are somewhat amusing, considering the embrace of Monster Energy by the online transgender community as a shared point of cultural reference. In particular, it has become a running joke that Zero Ultra is the drink of choice for many transwomen. This reflects a broader conflict of interests within transgender culture, which I have not yet seen anyone critically analyse. It is well-known that, for obvious reasons, the overall politics of queer communities are heavily left-leaning and anti-capitalist. Despite this, discourses within transgender spaces heavily revolve around the collective identification of commercial commodities as shared cultural references. Monster Energy is an obvious example of this phenomenon, as is the IKEA Blåhaj plushie being informally adopted as a sort of animal mascot for transwomen. This is a trend that I admit to also being guilty of participating in. Unfortunately, a detailed exploration of this paradoxical consumerism is beyond the scope of this current essay.

Returning to the question of energy drinks: it is obvious that these caffeinated beverages are an unhealthy coping mechanism for the struggle of daily life in late-stage capitalism. For example, a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that “energy drinks significantly prolong the QTc interval and raise brachial and central blood pressure post‐acute exposure.” This is a problematic finding because “QTc interval prolongation is a biologically plausible reason for the sudden cardiac arrest associated with energy drinks and QTc prolongation places patients at increased risk for developing torsades de pointes, which can lead to fatal ventricular arrhythmias.” That such a large number of people (including myself) rely on these drinks for effective functioning in the moden workplace environment is almost certainly indicative of a dysfunction inherent to the current sociopolitical system. This is especially problematic for someone such as myself, given that hormone replacement therapy increased an individual’s risk of cardiovascular disease. What other conclusion can be drawn from this analysis? A functional system would not require people to put themselves at an artificially increased risk of heart attack just so that they can meet strict deadlines and work around the clock without sleep. Yet it increasingly seems that the forces of capital are surpassing the biological human constraints that would otherwise necessitate some amount of cautious moderation.

In May of 2023, The Economist published an article that began as follows: “Towards the end of last year[,] America began running short of medicines used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), including Adderall (an amphetamine) and Ritalin (a central-nervous-system stimulant). Nine in ten pharmacies reported shortages of the medication, which tens of millions of Americans use to help improve focus and concentration. Around the same time, something intriguing happened: American productivity, a measure of efficiency at work, dropped. In the first quarter of 2023, output per hour fell by 3%.” The article does state that “other things could have explained the productivity dip. Equally, though, many of America’s most productive people rely on Adderall to get the job done. It often seems like half of Silicon Valley, the most innovative place on Earth, is on the stuff.” Interestingly, just as “pharmacies are finally getting drugs back in stock and regulators have removed some medications from their official-shortages list”, it seems that “American productivity appears, once again, to be rising. Coincidence?”

Obviously, drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin are not the same as caffeine. However, this news article points to a very important conclusion: capitalism is a system that requires its subjects to artificially stimulate themselves in order to support the continuous circulation of capital. As the American mathematician Theodore Kaczynski argues in the Unabomber Manifesto, “[t]he system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. […] Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious.”

Caffeine is not the only stimulant used by capitalism to modify human behaviour, but it has historically been the most important one. In his book This Is Your Mind On Plants, the American journalist Michael Pollan outlines the histories of both capitalism and caffeine, and finds them to be inexplicably interwoven. He notes that “Western civilisation was innocent of coffee or tea until the 1600s; as it happens, coffee, tea, and chocolate (which also contains caffeine) arrived in England during the same decade – the 1650s – so we can gain some idea of the world before caffeine and after. […] Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too. Having brought what amounted to a new form of consciousness to Europe, caffeine went on to influence everything from global trade to imperialism, the slave trade, the workplace, the sciences, politics, social relations, arguably even the rhythms of English prose.”

Even the emergence of “public coffeehouses” in Europe was its own cultural paradigm shift, representing “a new kind of communications medium, one that just happened to be made of brick and mortar rather than electricity and wires. You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information – in the form of newspapers, books, magazines, and conversation – was free.” In England, “coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. So, for example, merchants and men with interests in shipping gathered at Lloyd’s Coffee House. Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyd’s Coffee House eventually became the insurance brokerage Lloyd’s of London. Similarly, the London Stock Exchange had its roots in the trades conducted at Jonathan’s Coffee-House.”

Most importantly, however, “coffee helped disperse Europe’s alcoholic fog, fostering a heightened alertness and attention to detail, and, as employers soon discovered, dramatically improving productivity.” Caffeine was “to liberate us from the fixed rhythms of the sun, an astronomical timepiece that also sets the clocks of our bodies. Before caffeine, the whole idea of a late shift, let alone a night shift, was inconceivable – the human body simply would not permit it. But the power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.” Pollan remarks that “it is more than a coincidence that caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment. For medieval man, and especially for the man doing physical labour outdoors, the angle of the sun mattered more than the hand of the clock. There had been no minute hand because there had been no need to subdivide the hour. But new kinds of work demanded much closer attention to time and its increments, and what psychoactive drug is more time-bound than caffeine?”

Although the cultural influence of coffeehouses was important, the role of tea in capitalism’s development cannot be understated. Pollan argues that “it was tea from the East Indies – heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies – that fuelled the Industrial Revolution.” This is because “tea allowed the working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions, and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in tea became a crucial source of calories. […] But in addition to helping capital extract more work from labour, the caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the Machine – demanding, dangerous, and incessant. It’s difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.” As Kaczynski infamously argues, the consequences of the Industrial Revolution have ultimately “increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in 'advanced' countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”

Pollan suggests that “Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘body discipline’ could profitably be used to describe the effects of caffeine, since it helped bend humans to the wheel of the Machine and the requirements of a new economic and mental order. Looked at that way, caffeine is a curse, addicting us to a regime that makes us more tractable and productive workers, speeding us up so that we may better keep pace with the manmade machinery of modern life.” In Kiberd’s book, we can see the truly modern worker dependent on caffeine: “I was that person who sends emails in the middle of the night. I would sit upright in bed with my laptop overheating across my knees, wondering which part of my body would atrophy first, before going to the gym to furiously counteract the hours of stasis. I ate a narrow, caffeine-heavy diet, mainly involving Special K cereal, microwaved vegetables, and cans of Monster Energy Rehab, a guarana-iced tea hybrid drink which generated a slight ringing in my ears.”

The unusual sleep schedule that accompanied this lifestyle is described in Kiberd’s description of her average daily routine: “I woke up at six, read the news and watched YouTube videos. By eight I’d be seated in a cafe somewhere in the Docklands, watching people with actual jobs go to work, and apparently ‘working’ on my laptop. By mid-afternoon I’d go home and fall asleep, or wander around charity shops, or smoke weed in the overgrown back yard of the house I shared. Then I’d work some more, past midnight. Finally, I’d change into leggings and a hoodie, and go to the gym until 3a.m. or 4a.m.” This routine “drew me further away from contact with other humans, leaving only the company of the machines. […] I told myself that each cancelled invitation, each ignored event or unanswered message was proof that I was working hard.”

Kiberd is a perfect example of what the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the achievement-subject of modern capitalism. In his book The Burnout Society, Han argues that “illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” These illnesses “point to [the] excess positivity” that characterises what Han refers to as the achievement society: “Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories […] has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.” The disciplinary society “is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The negative modal verb that governs it is May Not. […] Achievement society, more and more, is in the process of discarding negativity. Increasing deregulation is abolishing it. Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society. Its plural form – the affirmation, ‘Yes, we can’ – epitomises achievement society’s positive orientation. Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.”

However, “the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom – that is, to the free constraint of maximising achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. […] The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it.” As a result, “[t]he achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalised war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.” On this topic, the British philosopher Mark Fisher observes that depression has become “the condition most dealt with by the National Health Service, and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages.” Fisher thus asks: “how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.” It is within this sociopolitical context that depression must be understood.

I do not have a caffeine dependency - I am simply caught up in a historical process that I have no control over. Rather, it is capitalist society that has a caffeine dependency. Clearly, it is not a sustainable dependency. There is a limit to how much artificial stimulation the human body can take. However, Kaczynski argues that “human nature has in the past put certain limits on the development of societies. People could be pushed only so far and no farther. But today this may be changing, because modern technology is developing ways of modifying human beings.” For example, the treatment of mental health has become increasingly liberalised with the advent of medical technologies, focusing on altering the unhealthy individual rather than the systemic roots of mental illness. Kaczynski encourages people to “[i]magine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. […] Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”

The Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter observes that “antidepressants enjoy a remarkable degree of tolerance from the authorities, even though they can have very harmful consequences. The range is very broad, and includes muscular spasms, a slowing of cognitive activity, a paradoxical risk of dependency, Parkinson-type symptoms, bouts of akathisia, and even a fatal disruption to the nervous system.” In fact, “most users end up suffering from anhedonia and sexual impotence. Not only can the detachment effect make it impossible to feel pleasure physically, but this impossibility can manifest itself in a total ablation of sexual desire – as being’s driving force. That an individual might no longer feel or desire anything seemingly poses no problem for doctors or public authorities (or pharmaceutical companies); it is even accepted that this is the ultimate meaning of the phrase ‘getting better’. […] That it should be without happiness and without desire is the price to be paid if existence is to be spoken of at all; in the age of anaesthesia, there is no existence except as psychic asceticism, bringing together the fate of the body with that of the functions it can fulfil.”

Of particular relevance to the discussion of modern depression is burnout syndrome, which occurs when the human body is no longer able to keep up with capitalism’s demands. Han argues that depressive burnout “erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able [nicht mehr können kann]. It is primarily a response to “an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses” which “radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. Moreover, the mounting burden of work makes it necessary to adopt particular dispositions toward time and attention [Zeitund Aufmerksamkeitstechnik]; this in turn affects the structure of attention and cognition.” This troubling phenomenon is the inevitable result of the “systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions. It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul.”

Mental illnesses such as burnout syndrome and depression are no longer mere medical issues. As Han points out: “The violence [Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer ‘viral.’ Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenomenon. […] Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation – when too much exists – do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive from immunological negativity.” Fisher argues that “[b]y privatising these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.” This understanding of mental illness “has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualisation (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls).”

Depressive burnout is primarily a cultural syndrome, not a medical one. Kiberd describes her own personal experience with depressive burnout in the introduction to her book. After receiving a job as a weekly column writer specialising in coverage of internet culture, she “worked hard, and didn’t leave the house very often. I spent more time in front of a screen than ever before, and I spent more time reading people’s tweets than having conversations face to face. A distance formed between me and the rest of the world, and I began to view reality in terms of the internet, where before it had been the reverse.” She describes an “emotional entropy” as she “withdrew from the real world, which seemed almost painful in its brightness, its demands to appear healthy and balanced, and to sleep at night and work during the day.”

Eventually, “I realised I was numb. I was stuck behind a screen, and behind that screen, I was stuck inside a body that felt very little apart from exhaustion. […] I thought everyone else was utterly certain of themselves and what they stood for, and that my failure to do the same was a sign of some deep-rooted, incurable failing.” In the ensuing mental breakdown, Kiberd “swallowed about a month’s supply of pills, and some painkillers just in case, and washed everything down with cheap coconut-flavored rum. Then I lay down and felt my world turn into pillows, a soft, distorted nothingness which must be what it feels to let go of Some Who Isn’t Me.” Fortunately, Kiberd did not die, and she “ended up in a six-week outpatient programme in suburban south Dublin, a reeducation plan for those who had forgotten how to be human.”

I personally experienced my own battle with depressive burnout in the latter half of 2023 while struggling to balance my full-time job with the final semester of my full-time university course. Although the ensuing mental decline was not as severe as Kiberd’s, I have found myself struggling with occasional bouts of depression and anhedonia in the months since finishing my university course, though the recent reduction in overall stress has given me time and space to focus on improving both my own physical and mental health. I have also come to the conclusion that the entire university course was a massive waste of time and money, and that I effectively sabotaged my own mental health for no reason. And I am still unconvinced that my sleep patterns are not irreversibly damaged for the foreseeable future.

I also see elements of my university experience reflected in Fisher’s recollections of teaching at a Further Education college in Britain: “Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. […] Foucault painstakingly enumerated the way in which discipline was installed through the imposition of rigid body postures. During lessons at our college, however, students will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly, snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating full meals).” Fisher also notes that, despite the apparent lack of student engagement, “none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. […] They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it.” Students “typically respond to this […] by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.”

Kaczynski argues that as capitalism continues to accelerate, “it is unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be sufficient to adjust human beings to the kind of society that technology is creating. […] Neurology may provide other avenues for modifying the human mind. Genetic engineering of human beings is already beginning to occur in the form of ‘gene therapy,’ and there is no reason to assume that such methods will not eventually be used to modify those aspects of the body that affect mental functioning.” Even more terrifying, however, is the foreboding warnings of Sutter, who believes “that we could remove the need for sleep. In the same way that during World War II, the German general staff distributed amphetamine derivatives to Wehrmacht soldiers to get them to advance for several days on end without sleeping, specialists in the American army are becoming interested in certain species of bird that hardly sleep at all. […] This post-nycthemeral ecology is both the horizon of expectation of a capitalism that seeks to multiply the ‘extra time’ it extracts from its labour power, and the target of a new market, towards which it has never stopped moving.”

There have already been multiple scientific experiments on the possibility of negating sleep deprivation’s negative side-effects. For example, the Journal of Neuroscience has previously published a study finding that the effects of sleep deprivation in nonhuman primates could be easily reversed using Orexin-A nasal spray. This finding has not yet been replicated within a study of humans, but it does suggest that further technological developments in the field of medicine could allow capitalism to further encroach on humanity’s natural sleep patterns. And why should this scenario seem so unrealistic? After all, as Han argues, the average human is already “no sovereign superman but ‘the last man,’ who does nothing but work. The new human type, standing exposed to excessive positivity without any defence, lacks all sovereignty. The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself – and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. […] Their life equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.” As capitalism continues to accelerate, life will eventually become “stripped of all transcendent value” and “reduced to the immanency of vital functions and capacities, which are to be maximised by any and all means.”

What Han describes above is the historical period of capitalism that Fisher refers to as the slow cancellation of the future, characterised by the passing of time without any significant cultural or political developments. In this paralysing perpetual present, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” This is the time “when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.” The French composer François Bonnet exemplifies this sentiment by arguing that “nothing happens anymore. Nothing any longer has the time to happen. There is no duration left for anything to unfold in. Nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense.” The “postindustrial era is […] locked in the grip of an ever more condensed, ever more instantaneous experience of the current. This kind of condensation, the acceleration of the present through the runaway presentation of synchronous instants, contributes to the onset of a generalised paralysis of the current. Everywhere, it becomes viscous. It coagulates. It accelerates so much that it begins to seem static. And as a generalised stasis emerges, so also does an indifference to whatever may happen. […] We happily allow ourselves to be taken over by a microfragmented temporality that paralyses us, that inscribes us and submerges us in an eternal present.”

This “eternal present”, made up “of instants separated from one another, shattered into ever more tenuous fragments”, creates “an exhaustion of vitality that accompanies the impossibility of keeping up the pace, a burnout that comes with continually having to synchronise ourselves – to the latest news, the latest request, the latest order, the latest counter-order, the latest fashion, the latest music, the latest film, the latest star.” However, “these things have no importance in themselves. They are just codes, passwords that allow us to follow the thread, and to get to the next synchronisation.” As Han says, “life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value.” He argues that “narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterised by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative. It does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated.” The eternal present is simply an endless flow of information that “rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure.”

Han argues that “neoliberal dispositifs of authenticity, innovation and creativity involve a permanent compulsion to seek the new, but they ultimately only produce variations of […] a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again.” Without closure, there can be nothing that is truly new, only that which is additive or repetitive. As Fisher states, “[t]he new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. […] Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.” Without the emergence of that which is truly new – that which is radical and revolutionary – society remains stuck in the perpetual present. However, Fisher also notes that “the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.”

Bonnet asks: “What comes after the present? We have lived through the first two decades of the twenty-first century and we still haven’t managed to rid ourselves of inertia.” Even the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic did not change the sociopolitical trajectory of human societies. Just a few years later, things have effectively returned to “normal” (for lack of a better term), despite high numbers of cases still being reported by many countries. Nor has the growing threat of climate change caused serious political or economic reform in any developed countries. If neither a global pandemic or environmental destruction can dispel the crushing sense of an “eternal present” where “nothing happens anymore”, then what can? Perhaps the actual end of the world itself, and the actual end of history with it. After all, such a catastrophic scenario is apparently easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.

Bibliography

Bonnet, F. J. (2020). After Death. Urbanomic

Deadwyler, S. A., Porrino, L., Siegel, J. M., & Hampson, R. E. (2007). Systemic and Nasal Delivery of Orexin-A (Hypocretin-1) Reduces the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Performance in Nonhuman Primates. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(52), 14239-14247

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books

Getahun, D., Nash, R., Flanders, D. W., Baird, T. C., Becerra-Culqui, T. A., Cromwell, L., Hunkeler, E., Lash, T. L., Millman, A., Quinn, V. P., Robinson, B., Roblin, D., Silverberg, M. J., Safer, J., Slovis, J., Tangpricha, V., & Goodman, M. (2018). Cross-sex Hormones and Acute Cardiovascular Events in Transgender Persons: A Cohort Study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 169(4), 205-213

Han, B. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press

Han, B. (2020). The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Polity Press

Kaczynski, T. J. (2010). Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber." Feral House

Kiberd, R. (2021). The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet. Serpent’s Tail

Pollan, M. (2021). This Is Your Mind On Plants. Penguin Books

Shah, S. A., Szeto, A. H., Farewell, R., Shek, A., Fan, F., Quach, K. N., Bhattacharyya, M., Elmiari, J., Chan, W., O’Dell, K., Nguyen, N., McGaughey, T. J., Nasir, J. M., & Kaul, S. (2019). Impact of High Volume Energy Drink Consumption on Electrocardiographic and Blood Pressure Parameters: A Randomised Trial. Journal of the American Heart Association, 8(11), e011318

Sutter, L. (2018). Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia. Polity Press

The Economist (2023, May 25). What performance-enhancing stimulants mean for economic growth. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/whatperformance-enhancing-stimulants-mean-for-economic-growth