Wow I missed coffee. This week I had my first cup of coffee in what feels like forever. I'm usually not a fan of the caffeine high that comes with the drink and find the notion of drinking uncaffeinated coffee quite odd. However, this week I was at a local coffeeshop outside my LA AirBnb and felt an urge to give their House Mocha a try.
As I was sipping on my little mocha, I started thinking: half the people I know are hopelessly addicted to the drink and need it to function properly in the mornings. Anecdotally, their consistent consumption of it does help them function better throughout the day when compared to them not drinking any coffee at all.
The few people I know who never tried it think they’re crazy and can’t imagine why anyone would want to make themselves dependent on a drink just to function.
I get it though. Coffee makes you feel great. I used to love coffee — now I only drink it occasionally and sip on teas in the morning. Its all I need to get my daily dose of caffeine — which is unarguably the world's most popular nootropic.
Nootropics: a class of drugs that have recently become very popular in tech circles by promising higher levels of productivity and efficiency by enhancing human cognitive function. While some of the most popular nootropics - caffeine - have been consumed by humanity for millennia and others - l-theanine, creatine - for decades, the word "nootropic" is now used colloquially to refer to a group of new-age drugs that have been heavily promoted by the self-proclaimed thought-leaders our generation. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of their recommend chemicals have sparse medical research behind their supposed benefits.
Given the current state of consumer goods, it seems only logical that venture-backed D2C nootropics companies will emerge to capitalize on this trend. And they have! Companies such as Bulletproof Coffee, HVMN (Nootrobox), and Nootroo have emerged offering nootropics with ingredients (Bacopa Monnieri, Ashwagandha, Citicoline) few have ever heard of. While they may prove to be a staple of every popular multivitamin in the future, the body of research supporting their claimed effects right now is extraordinarily limited.
Basically, we just have to take it their word on it for now.
What I find more interesting about the idea of nootropics is their existence within the popular vitamin and pain killer metaphor.
Nootropics, or rather what nootropics promise, is a drug that makes you a cognitively-empowered version of yourself. They promise you a better version of yourself that didn't know that you could be. And once you experience that better version of yourself, you no longer want to revert to that previous, lesser version of yourself. The idea of the nootropic turns from a curiosity into a necessity.
Like coffee. Once you have your first cup and you realize how much more energetic and alert you are throughout the day, it's tough to stop and let yourself fall back to a more lethargic version of yourself. You begin to crave coffee in the mornings — you begin to crave the better version of yourself that it delivers.
Craving is a scary word, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just implies there is something out there which you have experienced, loved, and want to experience again.
So as a solution to a problem, a nootropic is essentially a product that doesn't feel necessary until the user experiences it for the first time. The user doesn't realize they had the problem until they were given the solution — the nootropic. By solving a major pain point that the user was previously unaware they had, the product transforms from a curiosity to a necessity in an instant.
So the existence of nootropics implies the existence of a problem not yet understood as a problem. It only becomes understood as a problem when the solution, the nootropic, is experienced and the user experiences life with the nootropic in hand. And once that happens, the nootropic becomes a necessity for them because it solves a problem they didn't even know they even had. The understanding of the problem is intrinsically tied with the solution.
So what are these problems exactly? I don't have a name for them yet.
They are not obviously "problems". Few will think of them as such, For the majority of people, they are just acceptable norms. That's because these problems in this category are so fundamentally inherent to the present human condition. These problems include human loneliness, information overflow, structured conformity, and multi-identity — and their companions are at the same level of abstraction and nativeness.
In a way, the solution begets the problem here —for the majority of people, it will take experiencing the solution to understand the problem. But once they do, the fact that it is a problem becomes obvious and that calcifies the problem's existence in their understanding as "problems". The solution — the nootropic — then becomes a necessity in their lives, our lives.
It fills a hole in our hearts that we didn't even know we had.
Is this useful as a framework — or just a nuanced hash of a vitamin? LMK.
The Weekly Nibble
Feeling the information overload? Yea me too. This is the best read I found this past week. Take a peep and LMK.
https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/cultural-credibility-brands/
While written for aspiring fashion designers, this is a surprisingly applicable piece for consumer tech companies. Taking a stance on the pressing social issues of our time have recently become a popular tactic that has shown to lead to positive business results (see: Nike's Kaepernick ad). However, the difficulty here is for them to find their authentic selves and decline from being corny and performative — modern consumers are too savvy to be fooled. Real recognizes real.
Anyways, I'm making a few changes to this blog moving forward.
I recently ported everything from my website over to Substack. I expect this to make reading + sharing easier for you and publishing easier for me.
I'll start making weekly releases rather than these variable posts. I initially went with the variable post schedule as an effort to keep the bar to publishing low but found the opposite occurred. No forcing function → more filtered thoughts. I'm here to give you something more natural, something less filtered. Something less unidirectional and more of a dialogue. My thoughts to you here will be raw and I hope you will reciprocate in kind. Let's have a conversation.
That's all for now fam. See you in the DMs. 📨
Shoutout Brandon Lu, Sreekanth Sajjala, and Spencer Yen for engaging in honest conversation with me about the last post, Instagram Photos (and sending dope links to consume) Appreciate y'all ❤