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Comment by Afton | Hacker News Reader

I feel that addictions are only a problem if they are a problem. As far as we can tell, non-crazy-quantity coffee drinking isn't bad for you, might be helpful for some things, and tastes delicious.

The only downside is that I have to be slightly prepared if I am not going to be able to easily consume my regular doses of caffeine. And if I want to cut/stop, it takes about a week or so to do so comfortably.

As for the glorification, I think it's really a glorification of workaholics, and 'needing coffee to get through yet another pile of TPS Reports' is more a badge of honor than anything else.

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I think that many addictions can be ok, so long as you understand how much power they have over you and keep a wary eye on them.

An addiction can work well in some environment but completely destroy you if your environment changes.

Also, I'm not convinced that caffeine addiction is completely overcome in the week or so it takes for the physical withdrawal. Even for myself when I decide to go through long periods of decaffeination, I find that my energy and motivation is significantly deteriorated from when I regularly caffeinate. Sometimes I wonder if my regular use as a college student permanently altered my brain chemistry. On the flip side, maybe this use set me up for the early career success that I might not otherwise have achieved.

Caffeine is a drug that generally increases energy and motivation so it makes sense that those levels wouldn’t be as high without consuming it.

Another option is that you have one of a handful of atypical neurologies for which caffeine is a form of self-medication.

Again, the problem is availability, and we've decided in this country (and most countries) that caffeine should be widely available. So it's not a significant problem, and is easy if slightly time-consuming if you need to update your context.

It's probably worth tying this discussion into applications to e.g. the war on drugs, but the language there tends to be so hyped up that it's too hard to have a good discussion about it.

Isn't that the primary difference between an addiction and a dependency? Something can be done/used regularly that would be considered a dependency (e.g., coffee), but only elevates to addiction-level severity when said behaviour becomes problematic.

Yes. E.g. https://www.hss.edu/conditions_understanding-addiction-versu...

Which makes you wonder how much drug use would be merely 'dependence' if we had free and easy access. I suspect it is a drug-by-drug case, depending on length of trip, relative incapacitation, physical dependencies (/withdrawal), rate of tolerance increase, etc.

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