A Society That Runs on Stimulants is Badly Broken

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A Society That Runs on Stimulants is Badly Broken

Around the world, people are pumping themselves full of caffeine, amphetamines, and other performance-enhancing drugs just to survive their working hours. This isn’t sustainable.

Alex Skopic

filed 18 August 2026<br>in

Labor

Isn’t it a little odd, when you think about it, that so many people have to be hopped up on chemical stimulants just to make it through their working day?

Usually, you don’t think about it. These substances are just quietly ubiquitous, and so is the exhaustion that leads us to seek them out. Talk to almost anyone about how they’re doing lately, and if they know you well enough to say something more than “good, thanks,” they’ll probably say they’re tired. The reasons aren’t mysterious: as we’ve all heard dozens of times, there’s an affordability crisis on. In a Guardian poll from July, more than half of Americans said they struggle to afford gas and groceries, and 45 percent said they’re having trouble paying their housing costs. It takes more and more work to stay above water, and the Washington Post reports that more and more people are taking on second or third jobs, driven by “years of rapidly rising prices that have gnawed away at household incomes.” Lots of them are working to pay their way through college, or while raising a small child, both full-time pursuits in their own right. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.6 percent of Americans now work longer than 40 hours a week, with a beleaguered five percent working as many as 60 hours. Despite Donald Trump’s insistence that “affordability is a fake word,” huge swathes of the population are broke and burnt out.

And so we load up on caffeine, taurine, L-carnitine, and other high-powered molecules. At my local corner store in New Orleans, you can choose from a really incredible array of “energy drinks”—a deceptive name, but we’ll get to that. Lately I've been getting “Monster Ultra Fantasy Ruby Red,” a violently pink elixir that sort of tastes like grapefruit, or someone’s memory of a grapefruit. But if citrus isn’t your speed, there’s also Java Monster Irish Blend Coffee, or a rainbow of different Red Bull colors, or Bang, or Ghost, or PRIME, or NOS. And that’s just the beverages; as Current Affairs editor Emily Topping wrote last year, gas stations offer even more questionable products in the form of pills, powders, or concentrated liquid “shots,” all holding out the promise of “energy.”

Flash back to 2019, and I was the guy behind the counter. As long-time readers might remember, I used to work retail at a Dollar General in rural Pennsylvania, and for the class of people who shop there, energy drinks are serious business. I still remember the customers in dirty overalls who would buy an entire 24-can case of Red Bull, only to show up a few days later and buy 24 more. They were working out on the gas fracking wells—one of the only growth industries in that part of PA—and apparently pulling some brutally long shifts. It struck me as unhealthy, but this was a case of “physician, heal thyself,” because I was also relying on energy drinks to get through a full day of college, and then work a night shift at the store selling the Red Bulls to them, so they could work to get the money to buy the Red Bulls. A chemical and commercial feedback loop.

Millions of Americans are doing the same thing, swallowing down gallons of “energy” every month. According to one 2025 study, around 30 percent of the U.S. population consumes “at least one energy drink per day.” There’s a generational split in those numbers; among the under-35 crowd, it’s 60 percent. The older demographic still prefers coffee, and 66 percent of Americans drink that every day, too. Frustratingly, there’s little research cross-referencing those figures to economic class, because not enough public health researchers are Marxists. But there are a few studies from social-democratic Denmark and Norway, the latter of which found a strong link between energy drink consumption and “low socioeconomic status.” In other words, there’s some scientific evidence for what you’d intuitively assume—that it’s largely people with low incomes and terrible jobs who jolt themselves awake with chemical syrups.

The deceptive part is that “energy drinks” don’t actually provide “energy,” beyond what you’d normally get by digesting a bunch of liquid sugar. Instead, they block your capacity to feel how tired you are. To severely oversimplify, all that caffeine functions as an antagonist for adenosine, the chemical that builds up in your brain during the day and makes you feel sleepy. The caffeine...