Pop culture and coffee are practically the same thing, isn’t it?
Like in many offices, mine too has a coffee machine. And the machine is rather popular among the employees for obvious reasons- nothing helps like coffee to keep you awake during a boring meeting(And seriously, which office meeting is not boring?).
In fact the love among the employees for the black Café Coffee Day machine that occupies a centre space in our office pantry is such that soon as someone saw me tinkering around with it in all the wrong ways possible, he came running to me and said, “Bro, please don’t ruin the machine. We need it!” There was a note of pleading in his tone and also a hint of comedy- which tells you all you need to know about people in our office- they are a pretty cool bunch.
I used to drink a lot of coffee but then I gave up because it kept me awake in the nights. The mild hyperactivity(is that even a thing?) which coffee resulted in also meant restlessness. This was no creative restlessness.
It was a full blown, I-feel-so-agitated-I-can’t-sit-on-my-ass-for-more-than-five-minutes strain which afflicted me during these times.
To satiate whatever sleeping beast was brought awake by caffeine, I listened to a whole lot of music. Much more than I generally did. And I also watched a whole lot of movies- much, much more than I generally used to.
The amounts of coffee that I consumed back then were insane, in hindsight- you would have been hard pressed to see me without my flask of coffee anywhere. Even when I went out for a movie or shopping, I carried the flask with me. It was ridiculous but that’s not how I felt then. It felt cool to be doing so.
I eventually stopped drinking coffee because my stomach began to rebel. And if there is one body part which you don’t want working against you, it’s your stomach. Because if your digestion is not proper, your life isn’t proper. If you think that’s an exaggeration, talk to me after you spend a month, day in and out in the closet, clutching your stomach, wondering if the pain in your underbelly means you are developing an ulcer.
But one positive off-shoot about the intense period of coffee drinking was that I listened to a whole lot more music and watched a lot of movies- one simply needs to fill up all those extra waking hours, you know.
And precisely for this reason, I remember that period- which lasted for about two years-
. Whenever someone says something like this- that they find a time period good because of the pop culture that one consumed, terms like ‘shallow’ and ‘meaningless’ are quickly used to describe the scenario.
However, consumption of pop culture by itself is not any less or more shallow than consumption of coffee. Both are parts of a wider culture which could be meaningless, meaningful or ulcer-inducing, depending on how you consume.
