Well, there is an innate drive to be part of a community baked into our biology. We see people enjoying something, and we want to do it too. It doesn't need to be framed so negatively as being an insecurity, though I wouldn't necessarily frame it as peer pressure, either. It's more just a human desire to share in a new experience with others.

Peer pressure is the sensation of psychological pressure when deviating from peers. It doesn't have to be caused intentionally or through active action, and it's a basic fact of life that at least 95% of humanity experiences. (I can't speak for all forms of neurodiversity).

You literally described peer pressure.

Any obligations you feel to do the thing is entirely caused by your own insecurities.

All children have a natural inclination to imitate their parents. It's a basic instinct of childhood development.

Once youre an adult parents should not longer be authority figures.

Also, someone drinking coffee without you isn't peer pressure.

Caffeine dependency is a thing for sure. You'll get some gnarly headaches for a few days and feel fatigued. Takes about 2 weeks to lose it.

Some people are more or less sensitive to caffeine. Going from one coffee a day to zero has me with headaches and tiredness for a day or two.

The way caffeine works is that it allows the body to release energy reserves that it usually "locks" away from you. It allows you to tap into these reserves for concentration and makes you feel less tired.

That's helpful for short-term use, giving you more energy and concentration.

But if you use too much caffeine for too long ("too much" depends on your body and "too long" is a few days), the body adjusts to the caffeine levels and now you have the same energy reserves and concentration that you had without caffeine before. Caffeine thus loses its effect on you and your baseline shifts, so that you need caffeine to be on the same level as before.

If you now stop your caffeine intake, this swings back. Your body thinks you are really tired and you get headaches, bad mood, low concentration and so on, until you either take in more caffeine or you abstain long enough for your baseline to shift back.

That's why there are people who say they can't work before they had their first coffee/energy drink. They literally can't, because if they aren't on the level of caffeine they are used to, their body tells them that they are super exhausted. This is the caffeine dependency/withdrawal effect.

Yeah , smoking is a great bonding activity even more so now that you have designated smoking areas. It's the new third place.

And I only smoked at work at first too. Then it wasn't just at work...

Also, it is Espresso in every language except French, where it is called Expresso

Espresso because you e-presso the fuck out of it.

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I always thought it came from "being pressed through the coffee grounds"

lower cost alternatives

lol

Once you have the wherewithal to grind your own coffee and acquire a percolator or a French press, a cup of coffee is dirt cheap and only takes like five minutes. Doesn't take -that- long to recoup the costs, either, if you're a regular drinker.

Buying coffee from Starbucks every morning is for suckers.

I'm reading "The Zoomers are Killing Coffee" headlines in my mind's eye already.

It’s definitely weird whatever it is. Can’t drink together because not both having coffee?

I'm pretty sure caffeine is a performance enhancing drug for a lot of jobs so no chance of that. Plus like you allude to, it can be synthetically manufactured for cheap without worrying about growth conditions or import of coffee beans.

I haven't noticed this personally. I quit for two weeks a while back and didn't notice any physical symptoms and just missed the ritual.

At that point I might do a full medical checkup. If it's so easy to get headaches and become "useless" for the day just because of coffee, that sounds like something else is going on in your body that makes you extra suspecible to these things, but I'm no medical professional, it just sounds extreme/rare to me, something worth checking out

Medical/clinical addiction normally revolves around hard-to-control cravings (can't stop thinking about it, might get aggressive if prevented from getting it), loss of control, etc. Dependence is essentially making your body used to something, and then having to consume it to feel normal, or feel like shit when you stop consuming it. While addiction and dependence are similar, addiction is far more brutal and hard to quit. By no means coffee is as hard to skip as cigarette, to anyone. If your reaction is "wow, coffee makes my head hurt, I don't want it", that's pretty opposite of addictive substance.

https://www.science.org/content/article/coffee-cravers-are-not-addicts