How Do You Measure a Life? In Caffeinated 5-Hour Bursts

New York Times

2 days ago

Energy drinks aren't meant to be enjoyed. This is why, for a long time, the 5-Hour Energy shot was my energy drink of choice. Where others pile on cloying flavors in an effort to hide their fundamental wretchedness — the rancid cotton-candy tang of Red Bull, the notes of crushed pill in Monster Rehab — 5-Hour Energy seems designed to be as bracingly terrible to drink as possible. The company calls it a dietary supplement, not a beverage. It certainly feels like a potion, viscous and medicinal on the tongue if you let it linger. Thankfully it goes down in a single gulp, though it often leaves a burn, not unlike the feeling of accidentally swallowing a spritz of bug spray.
The bottle is small and discreet, faintly recalling the chunky curvature of a battery. One unit packs 200mg of caffeine, the equivalent of about two cups of coffee. One of the 'extra strength' varieties (230mg) used to come wrapped in camouflage packaging: tactical gear for everyday war. The logo, my favorite part of the label, depicts the silhouette of a man running so hard that his feet hover off the ground. He is lifted.
I wanted to be lifted, too, though really I would have settled for being able to focus. Like every screen-addled person, I've felt my attention scattering, hopping the fence of my self-discipline to roam where it pleases. Sometime around the beginning of college, I started to try to reclaim my powers of concentration. And here was a little red capsule filled with those lost powers! Best of all, this incredible concoction was available in nearly every convenience store — no need to rely on dorm-room pill pushers. That 5-Hour Energy had come under F.D.A. scrutiny was unknown to me at the time. But even if I had known, it wouldn't have stopped me from taking that first swig. '5-Hour Energy is not an energy drink,' the potion's creator once told Forbes, 'it's a focus drink.'
Here's how it goes: After the initial burn subsides, there is a spreading warmth. Heat rises from beneath your skin; dormant powers stir. You may feel like Scarlett Johansson's character in 'Lucy,' suddenly able to use 100 percent of your brain, thanks to the experimental nootropic you've been smuggling in a baggie inside your stomach. You may feel like the character in the manga series 'Naruto' who opens forbidden gates within his soul. You may feel really, insanely tweaked. This is called a 'niacin flush,' and it can happen when you take so much of a certain B vitamin that your capillaries dilate. Whoosh! Caffeine delivery blooms into low-grade ecstatic experience; mild self-harm becomes a sort of lite transcendence.
Then, at last, the feeling you've been waiting for. Your world narrows and the horizon contracts until there is only your flushed head, floating somewhere above your irrelevant body, confronting the task before you. For me it took some practice to get the timing right. Many of my first doses sent down the attentional blinders at the wrong moment, and I would find myself spending hours doing things like navigating my hometown on Google Street View. I would emerge disoriented, as from a fugue, regretful that I wasted my precious focus on something stupid.
Was this what it felt like to 'lock in?' I had imagined focus as a form of power that would open my senses to more of the world's depth. It would allow me to 'bring [my] best self to every moment,' as a recent 5-Hour ad put it. But over time, the drink itself seemed to chip away at my life. Habitual use taught me to view my time on 5-Hour Energy as already spent or squandered in advance. 5-Hour time was a smooth stretch of oblivion. This was not 'energy,' not the expanding, lifting focus I was looking for. This was focus as world-subtraction. Toward the end of my period of heaviest use, I would down half a bottle before taking a nap.
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