Better Means: Your "Just Enough" Is the Point
You've probably seen this one on social media: someone asks another person — would you take a million dollars right now, knowing you won't wake up tomorrow morning? How would you answer?
Accumulation is the "invisible hand" — you are supposed to gather beyond measure, beyond need. Overproduce and maximize. Capitalism.
Prosperity in the coffee industry is for the few. And yet almost everyone tries to get there. They work hard, dream, push through long shifts at roasters, behind bars, on farms. We each understand our own version of prosperity differently — but we can probably describe it. Can you describe your level of sufficiency? How much is enough for you — just right, just ok?
Your "just enough" matters more to coffee people than the endless pursuit of accumulation.
Stability and security of life are worth more than the things you own. Your work is meant to serve you — not consume you without end.
You may know this one: Tantalus in Greek mythology stood neck-deep in water beneath a tree full of fruit. When he bent to drink — the water receded. When he reached for the fruit — the branches rose. Eternal nearness to what he desired, eternal impossibility of reaching it. Hence "the torments of Tantalus" — and the English word "tantalize."
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That is our condition under capitalism — to pursue the satisfaction of needs that the system will never allow us to satisfy, because we must always want more, faster, in reserve. And then we throw food away on a planet where countless millions go hungry.
There are movements that want to correct this from within. Degrowth is not recession or stagnation — it is a conscious departure from the growth imperative. A recognition that more does not mean better, because growth feeds on the exploitation of labor, nature, and the peripheries of the world.
Count us in that movement, if you like. The Better Coffee holds that degrowth would bring a better future for coffee people. So that enough would finally be enough — because most of us live in chronic scarcity.
We do believe, however, that attempts to optimize capitalism end up using "reform" to stabilize the system's own logic of accumulation. Many alternatives have already been absorbed and reformulated as the system's "sustainable" variants.
In coffee, we know this well. That absorbed reform is called specialty coffee.
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