This morning’s cuppa is a Spiced Vanilla Latte from Mountain Rose Herbs. The company is out of Oregon and usually has a lovely selection of loose-leaf teas. This one is a ginger and caramel spicy with “roasted apple flavors.” It’s tasty, but I can only have so much of it because it is strong, both in flavor and in caffeine. It says it doesn’t have too much caffeine, but I disagree just based on how my body responds.

The caffeine is needed almost every day, and I know I am not alone. I drink tea almost daily, but my real go-to for caffeine is coffee, as it is for most Americans. I read an article in The Atlantic about the American obsession with coffee and how it is a definitive thing—so much so that last time tariffs were a thing, coffee was written off as exempt.

The obsession is obvious. My black venti Americano from Starbucks this morning was $4.45. That is a substantial increase in pricing even from two years ago, let alone twenty years ago when I started drinking Americanos from Starbucks. I ordered a matcha for my son and a cold brew for me the other day, and the total was nearly $20. We were trying out the new protein additions, but still… two coffees?

Yet, we still show up. I still go to Starbucks, or one of the five other coffee stands in my tiny little town. In fact, our little unincorporated town has a Safeway and QFC with Starbucks, the actual Starbucks, and seriously five different independent coffee stands. This is in maybe a one-mile-by-four-mile radius.

And this isn’t unusual for the PNW. We love coffee. No matter that we are overrun with coffee places, there are lines and people in every single one of those locations.

So we shell out the money, and we will likely continue to do so even though coffee is not essential to anything other than our mental well-being.

It is curious to me what it is for people that keeps them paying out the nose for something that the body doesn’t need.

Habit? Nostalgia? The preferred way of getting caffeine into our exhausted and overwhelmed bodies?

For me, it is a mixture of things.

I need caffeine. Black coffee does not upset my stomach (a lot of things do).

And I guess I don’t need caffeine, but my life probably wouldn’t function quite as well without a stimulant.

But I digress.

Moving on. It is absolutely a habit. I prep my coffee pot the night before, and the first thing I do is turn it on after waking up. Sitting with a hot cup of coffee is a habit that I developed thirty years ago.

Nostalgia. Absolutely. The smell of a freshly opened bag of coffee beans reminds me of a Starbucks I went to with my grandmother when I was young. It was the first Starbucks to open in Spokane, and my grandmother, a lifelong coffee drinker, would bring me there and I would order Irish cream lattes. You can’t even get Irish cream lattes anymore, but I loved them back then. So the smell of a freshly opened bag of beans brings me back to my youth, when things were new still and not so worn around the edges.

I know that companies like Starbucks play on the nostalgia piece. I mean, Red Cup Day, anyone? But it is more than the Starbucks machine—it is the local shops too. People go and treat themselves with coffee. Or they get one when they need an extra lift. Or they get one before a long drive, long meeting, or long sporting event. Coffee cuts through the cold, the wind, the sun (when iced), and anything else that life throws our way.

We can continue because we have a coffee in hand.

At least that is my viewpoint.

Sadly, like so many things, coffee is at the mercy of Mother Earth, and we have thoroughly pissed her off, so the likelihood that coffee will continue to exist in such abundance is a shaky boat. In fact, in my opinion, losing coffee should be the next campaign for doing something about climate change.

Might get some people’s attention then.

Of course, people would rather just continue to go to their particular coffee spot, not thinking about where it comes from or when it will end. When it does end, people will care—but like so much, until that point, no matter… out of sight and out of mind.

Who knows, perhaps when that dreaded day comes, we will gather around at tea shops drinking Spiced Vanilla Latte mix from Mountain Rose Herbs. It is not the same, but not too shabby either.

Just for the love of everything holy, please don’t make it so my only caffeine option is an energy drink. I might, shudder, have to do it, but I won’t like a single thing about it.

Either way, if you are raising a cuppa of tea or of coffee or… gasp… of Monster, may you have the nostalgia, the bit of slowdown, and the eventual uptick in energy that our daily habit provides, because Lord knows, we all need it.