Red Bull Rights Now!
Mike Leitao ~ 06/04/2025
I am a caffeine addict. I run off very little sleep and lots of caffeine, like most of America. I have no shame in that fact, one might even go as far as to say I have pride in needing caffeine to function. However, my choice of caffeine intake was, is, and always will be energy drinks. Whether it is Red Bull, Monster, Reign, Rockstar, or anything else I see at Wawa or Giant that looks interesting, I rely on energy drinks to give me the boost I need to simply function as a human. Yet, when I crack open a cold Red Bull at work, I seem to get some slight glares of judgement from people, as if they are better than me because they do not put that toxic energy drink into their system. For far too long I have sat idly by as I deal with the immense judgement from others, but that ends today. I will no longer stand for the injustice that is given to fellow energy drink users like me, today I stand with them in the quest to get people to mind their own damn business.
Let us start with the obvious, energy drinks are clearly not good for you. The shit in them I have no doubt probably has long term negative effects on people and relying on them all the time to get through life is more than likely a good way to cause health problems down the road. No one with a brain will argue against that point, and since I have a brain, I will not argue, but agree that they are unhealthy. My simple counter is that I do not care at all. I enjoy my energy drinks, and at the moment, I do not see some awful clear drawbacks to them, so that means that I will not regret drinking them. I do understand that some people do have immediate drawbacks, whether it be intense grogginess shortly after consumption or headaches from the drink, some people are unfortunate enough to have these immediate negatives that force them to shy away from energy drinks. For those people, I would like to say I am sorry you do not get the feel of an ice-cold energy drink in the morning to keep you just motivated enough to work without killing yourself, but damn just because you can’t enjoy it doesn’t give y’all the right to act like you are better than us. If it wasn’t for those drawbacks right away, I know damn well y’all would be throwing them back with the rest of us, so kindly get off your high horse and go fuck yourself.
The other key demographic who loves to judge the energy drink users are some of the most hypocritical pieces of shit in the entire world. No one, and I mean no one, loves to shit on energy drink users more than coffee lovers. Seriously, the amount of people who drink coffee and see someone with an energy drink and think they are the scum of the earth is baffling. It is on the same level as running a red light in your car, then seeing someone else do the same shit but acting like their action is somehow worse than your own. The similarities between those of us addicted to energy drinks and those of us addicted to coffee are staggering. Both groups of people are looking towards a form of caffeine to help them survive their day-to-day life. Both groups legitimately need the caffeine to do anything, sometimes being walking zombies or incredibly irritable before getting the chance to ingest some caffeine into their system. Yet even though both groups are clearly very similar, they are judged so differently. The amount shirts or mugs or other random piece of clothing has some dumb saying like “Don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee” and people see it and laugh but if I had one that said “Don’t talk to me before I’ve had my Red Bull” people would judge me and look down on me like less of a person. Both sayings are implying the same thing “I need some form of caffeine in my system to function like a normal adult”, yet one is acceptable and the other makes you seem crazy.
The other thing no one seems to ever want to point out is that most energy drink people are drinking one energy drink to get themselves through the day, which most likely ranges between 100 and 200 mgs of caffeine. Meanwhile, coffee drinkers are going through 4 cups a day, and a lot of people do even more than that. The typical cup of coffee contains around 80 mg of caffeine, meaning that if you are drinking two cups of coffee a day, congrats you are putting more caffeine into your body than a Red Bull. The recommended limit for caffeine is 400 mg, meaning you would need to drink about 3.5 Red Bulls to hit that and 5 cups of coffee to hit that. I know a lot of Red Bull drinkers, and I do not know a single person who is even close to that number, worst case scenario they are a two a day type which puts them around 230 mg. I also know a lot of coffee drinkers, and almost all of them are doing 2+ cups a day, and probably around half at least are doing 4+ cups meaning there are a lot of people who are hovering at or breaking the recommended limit. Yet once again, the judgement flows in. You need 2 Red Bulls to get through the day? You are destroying your body and must be unhealthy. You need 5 cups of coffee to get through the day? Ha isn’t that just the magic of coffee, surely nothing wrong with that much caffeine intake.
This is not an article written to target coffee drinkers and say they are bad people. It is simply to put some things into perspective for them. As caffeine addicts, we should ban together and accept the fact that we are fully reliant on an external item to get us through basic daily life, and that’s ok. We should really be targeting the people who think they are so high and mighty since they don’t need caffeine, fuck those people.
