It’s something of a cliché, the geek hopped up on sugar and caffeine (and more recently, maybe Ritalin) and coding for 24 hours straight, or sitting up all night playing World of Whatever with some guy in Japan. Geekiness and legal drugs are inexplicably connected: there’s the Web comic Geeks on Caffeine, for one, and look: ThinkGeek has an entire section of stuff to buy called Caffeine, and there’s the famous caffeine-molecule T-shirt.
But maybe we’re starting to get worn out with the nonstoppedness of it all, as we Xers get older. It’s a lot harder to pull an all-nighter at 35 than it was at 25, caffeine or no. And so LifeHacker has some advice on quitting caffeine.
And today, my guru Mark Morford takes on our inability to just slow down:
Coffee is our national narcotic. Caffeine is time's Viagra. It is no coincidence that the rise of the godlike Starbucks Corp. coincided almost exactly with the rise of the Internet and the cell-phone explosion and the dot-com boom -- that is, with the insane rise in instant communication and multitasking. Caffeine helps up keep up with the mad onslaught, even as it destroys our ability to calm the hell down and get some deep rest.Did you know caffeine has a half-life in the body of six hours? That if you drink a big cup around noon, half of its 80-100 milligrams of nefarious caffeine are still bouncing through your bloodstream by dinnertime, and by midnight you've still got a happy glob of the stuff slapping at your exhausted brain stem like an angry wife slaps her ex-husband? Do you wonder why we're taking more and more sleeping pills and screwing with the body's natural rhythms and entering a vicious cycle of artificially jacking up/calming down to the point of, well, exhaustion?
As always, Morford is a voice of reason, of slow-down-ness:
We have been misled. It is one massive lie, a great myth of modern American culture that the more you think, the more you multitask, the more you process and analyze and ponder and the more stuff whirling around your brain at any given moment, the smarter and more connected you are. It is, in short, a total crock.We equate deranged, caffeinated busyness with smarts, with success, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Just ask the yogis, the gurus, the healers of the past 5,000 years: It is actually when you calm the mind, clear things out, breathe deep and sleep deeper and clean out the toxins and the caffeine and the Ambien, that's when real wisdom, real intuition comes your way. The rest is just, well, noise. Happy delicious annoying caffeinated sexy fun infuriating obnoxious unstoppable noise, but still noise.
And so now I’m off to make another pot of (full caffeine tea) and get about a week’s worth of writing, editing, blogging, and other assorted chores down before SciFi Friday starts tonight.
