What Can You Live Without?

When I say “live without” I don’t mean anything on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; I’m referring to the optional creature comforts that are so easily integrated into your life until your day is a house of cards teetering on this one superfluous thing and it’s just waiting to topple over.

Coffee is the stuff of so many newspaper cartoons ripped out and stuck to our grandmother’s fridges, so many Minion memes posted on our mother’s Facebook walls. I am very, very much a coffee person, and have been for most of my life, but recently I spent a few weeks without it: I was sick, I switched to green tea, and then when I got healthy I just…didn’t switch back. I didn’t even notice at first!! But then a few weeks into it I started wondering why I was having all these headaches, and couldn’t concentrate, and wasn’t working at my usual speed, and I started drinking coffee again, and it was like oh right this is an actual substance that has a direct physical effect, not just a cute beverage to sip out of a cute mug!

Of course, if I had kept going, I would have eventually been back to normal. Caffeine has a placebo effect, but it is also, beyond that, what I’ve come to think of as a kind of material superstition. I have the same thing with notebooks and pens, to a certain extent. I have books that I re-read as some kind of boost when I’m stuck on an article (this also fits under my latest made-up term “procrastireference”), or songs that I listen to on repeat despite the desperate pleas for some variety from the other person who lives in my house. “You don’t understand,” I always tell him, “I need this right now.”

This is probably my secret ascetic side coming to the surface, but I do think it’s interesting to periodically check in and see which elements of your life aren’t as necessary as they seem. If the question you’re asking your coffee is “Can I live?!?!” the answer is, duh, of course, yes you can live without coffee! But what do your thoughts look like without this thing you believed was so necessary? What do you really, truly need, and why?

Counterpoint: I wrote this whole post after drinking an entire French press of coffee while simultaneously participating in a GChat conversation, a text message exchange, and writing my to-do list for the day, so, I mean, take this post with a grain of caffeinated salt.

What do YOU think you can’t live without?