Good Feeling

You have to get off the Coke.

These were the words out of my dentist’s mouth, landing bluntly in the sterile cubicle in his high-rise office. I was seventeen years old. Two cigarettes and a Coca-Cola had been my breakfast routine for the entirety of my high school career. I’ve always loved Coke, and the only time I didn’t have an almost daily habit was when I had a different daily habit.

I never mixed Coke with alcohol. That was somehow wrong to me, like putting ketchup on a piece of cake. Now that I’ve been sober for years, Coke is my go-to after a long day.

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You can buy a Coke in every country except Cuba and North Korea. In Russia, Coca-Cola has officially halted production since the conflict with Ukraine, but it is imported from a bunch of places, including Taliban-held Afghanistan.

When sugar was rationed during World War II, Coca-Cola lobbied the US government and succeeded in having their product declared “essential” for the war effort. The company was granted an exemption. In return, it promised every American soldier around the world a Coke for five cents, regardless of what it cost to make them. Feel-good ads showed soldiers enjoying Coca-Cola to boost morale. Coke factories were set up around the globe to provide the “essential” drink to overseas Americans.

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In movies, when someone has an upset stomach or feels seasick, they’re offered a Coke. In Carnage (2011), Jodie Foster gives Kate Winslet a Coke for her nausea, apologizing because it hadn’t been refrigerated. Winslet’s character takes a few gulps and proceeds to throw up all over the carpet. I used to think this practice was just old school weirdness—a home remedy, like milk to “coat the stomach” or chicken soup to cure a cold—but it turns out there’s science behind it. Coke contains phosphoric acid and sugars, two of the main ingredients in anti-nausea medications, that work to calm stomach muscle contractions when you’re barfy. There’s, indeed, something soothing about an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

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In my last semester of high school, I was a sailor. I lived on a tall ship with forty-three other students for six months, circumnavigating South America. My parents had hoped the extreme nature of the voyage would break up my relationship with alcohol and replenish a dwindling respect for authority. As part of the ship’s crew, I studied in a tiny classroom where teenagers regularly puked into buckets while completing math assignments. I learned many things at sea. The concept of scarcity in economics, for instance. When you live on the open ocean, food and other provisions become scarce or completely unavailable, and people can become irrational about the value they place on these items. In the absence of booze, other items became my coveted trade goods: ice cream, cold Cokes, cigarettes. I had clandestine meetings with the ship’s cook, a tough guy from the Bronx to whom I doled out American bills for a pint of ice cream that I would devour in minutes, before anyone could catch me with the contraband. A fair chunk of the spending money I’d saved from my summer job went to desperate, delicious moments like this. I spent fifty dollars on Easter chocolate in Chile with the intention of making a killing off my crewmates when we were back at sea. I ate all of it in under a week. We found out later that the cook had been selling provisions paid for by the school and pocketing our money. He also slept with a student. He was let go midway through the trip, and the illegal ice cream racket was shut down.

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Cold Cokes were a currency aboard the SV Concordia, but they were almost impossible to obtain until we reached our ports. For one thing, the glass bottles sold in Latin America were heavy and difficult to store in the tiny space we shared. And there was no way to refrigerate them—the fridge in the galley was strictly off-limits to students. I always smuggled a couple anyway, knocking back a warm one during the starry overnight hours of a shift on watch. There was nothing better than downing those thirty-nine grams of liquid sugar after scorching, stinky, exhausting days at sea. Coca-Cola was in every port, even in the most remote places, like Easter Island.

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When it was first created in 1886, Coca Cola contained both caffeine and cocaine. The creator, pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, thought it was helping him to kick his morphine habit. But he was just becoming addicted to cocaine instead. His preparation was sold at pharmacies, an elixir, a medicinal concoction to help you feel better. It worked. Who wouldn’t feel fantastic hopped up on caffeine and cocaine? Eventually, of course, the coca leaves used for the flavouring were made cocaine-free.

You won’t find this history on the Coca-Cola website.

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Just getting to Easter Island was difficult in 1993, before daily flights from mainland Chile became commonplace. It might be the most remote location on the planet, located 3767 kilometres off the coast of Chile and over 2000 kilometres from Pitcairn Island. To visit by boat is relatively rare, and our arrival at this speck of land was momentous, the anticipation having built for ten days at sea from Isla Robinson Crusoe, our previous port. There’s an inexplicable magic to living on the water, the terror of vanishing land mixed with the elation of raw freedom. This feeling fades to something like claustrophobia when you’ve been crammed into a damp, salty, lurching vessel too long, with too little of everything and too many people. Land appears again like a deep breath, the relief of something solid and permanent approaching. 

The 1994 big-budget film, Rapa Nui (after the original name of the island), was in production when we arrived. Every spare room in Hanga Roa, the island’s only town, was occupied by people working on the film. We were only allowed to visit because we brought our own accommodations. There was no harbour, so we anchored off the coast and ferried in crew on a small inflatable Zodiac.

The film’s helicopter was a constant presence. During a tour, our guide was required to differentiate between the authentic Easter Island relics and those that had been constructed for the film. Hollywood’s presence was visible everywhere. Historic monuments were surrounded by props like grass huts and rudimentary canoes. Walking around the small island was a continuous guessing game of authenticity. I found myself taking inventory. Was that statue fake, or one of the real, breathtaking Moais?

The film altered the island in other ways. Our arrival was greeted by two men on horseback, obviously inebriated, riding erratically through Hanga Roa, yelling obscenities. We were told this type of sighting had become commonplace for the locals as well as the film crew. There’d been a dramatic increase in supplies shipped to the island, including Coca-Cola, alcohol, and drugs. Despite this, there were shortages of almost everything. The island’s pace was ill-suited to the material demands of Hollywood’s presence. Rumours circulated about sexual assaults. Locals advised girls not to walk the small dirt roads alone after dark. Everywhere we went, we had to imagine the island without the presence of the film production. A film about the lost Rapa Nui culture was obscuring the authenticity of the Rapa Nui culture. The presence of the filmmakers had changed the island.

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At the beginning of 2023, Coca-Cola released a two-minute film titled “Masterpiece,” featuring an art student at a museum who falls asleep in the middle of a drawing assignment. Paintings by Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Utagawa Hiroshige, and contemporary artists like Wonderbuhle and Stefania Tejada become animated and toss Andy Warhol’s Coke bottle around the gallery until Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring hands it to the dozing student, whose sketch is magically perfected by the time the instructor approaches to check his progress. Seeing these classic and contemporary works come to life, invigorating the art student by providing him a Coca-Cola, reinforces my own deeply-embedded notion that a cold Coke can wash over me and clean away my stress like it dissolves blood off pavement or clears a clogged drain. How many projects in art school did Coke keep me awake long enough to complete? How many times did Coke melt away my nausea after an inappropriate amount of alcohol the night before? I’m not sure Munch or Van Gogh would agree with their work being used this way, but that seems largely inconsequential. “Masterpiece” isn’t about art and the questions it asks. It is about Coke and the questions it is supposed to answer.

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There’s now wall art in Hanga Roa depicting a Moai drinking a Coke. An image of this is available for sale on stock photo sites.

The film Rapa Nui was a disaster both commercially and creatively. The presence of the artists changed the place and my perception of it. I have photos of majestic stone Moais beside toppled fibreglass fakes. My memories of Easter Island include the sound of a helicopter, a village of replica huts in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a local population that was unduly affected by the consumerism of North America.

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In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective for the artist Marina Abramovic. For three months that spring, Marina’s four-decade career showed at MoMA. There were photographs and objects on display, videos and installations— like her now-famous Rhythm 0 (1974), where she placed seventy-two objects on a table, including a bullet and a gun, allowing the audience to do whatever they wanted to her. Artists re-performed some of her early works in various parts of the gallery. Also included was a new original work, The Artist is Present. Renowned for her often-shocking performance art, Abramovic sought to embrace the idea that the artist’s presence in the gallery is rare and special, that access to the artist can change the art itself or, in this case, be the art. In the atrium, she sat in a wooden chair for seven hours a day, six days a week. There was a table and another chair, across from her. Gallery patrons lined up for hours for the chance to sit across the table from Abramovic. Guests could stay as long as they wanted. Some stayed several hours, staring into her eyes. Some guests cried. Sometimes Marina cried. One man returned numerous times and wrote a book about his experience. Abramovic later had the table removed. She felt it was a barrier to the energy flow between her and the participants. She trained her body to go without food and water during the hours she sat in the chair. She timed her intake so that she wouldn’t have to use the bathroom until the museum closed. She even learned how not to sneeze.

Like many of her performances, The Artist is Present was painful. Her body hurt during and after the hours in the chair. This performance made her a celebrity. Her name began circulating among people outside of the art world, beyond the domain of performance art. 850, 000 people attended The Artist Is Present.

Marina Abramovic has said she is now like a brand, “like Coca-Cola.” She is what people think of when they think of performance art. She has performed all over the world, learning from spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama and teaching superstars like Lady Gaga the “Abramovic Method,” a set of practices to reach a higher creative consciousness.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Abramovic says she goes “on research trips to places that don’t have Coca-Cola or electricity, away from civilization. I’m interested in nature and people from different cultures who push their bodies and their minds in a way we don’t understand.”

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In the 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Coke bottle drops from an airplane into the Kalahari desert. A man from a remote African tribe finds it. The object causes friction among his people, who have never before seen a Coca-Cola bottle. There is urgency among the tribe members to return the otherworldly relic to the gods. The man is sent beyond the desert to throw the bottle off the edge of the earth. The Coke bottle’s presence wreaks havoc on the tribe’s functioning.

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As a sailing student in 1993, I’d been on the maiden voyage of the SV Concordia. When we sailed the Strait of Magellan, the ship listed so dramatically the rails were under water. On that leg of the trip, we’d had to be harnessed on deck at all times, to avoid getting thrown out to sea by the violent swells. Our captain said he thought the ship would break in half. At seventeen, I found this hilarious. In 2010, the Concordia sunk off the coast of Brazil, in the same waters I’d sailed the year many of the students who would be involved in the catastrophe were born. There was nothing funny about it. Incredibly, everyone on board survived. They took care of each other, spending harrowing nights in inflatable lifeboats on rough seas. Their economy had changed: scarcity took on a new meaning. The sail training barquentine now sits at the bottom of the Atlantic, too far beneath the surface for recovery. I sometimes wonder how many stashed Cokes went down with it. Like fine china aboard the Titanic.

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Marina Abramovic says her performances are transformative for both her and the audience. People who sat across from her at The Artist Is Present reported feeling moved by the experience. There was something about her being there in the gallery that visitors wanted to understand, and they were willing to wait hours to do so. Some reached the front of the line and changed their minds. Others watched from the sidelines, observing the performance of her presence all day. Her body in the chair, the eye contact she made with every participant, the silence between them—all of this was the show. The attendees’ participation was as much the art as Abramovic, in her red, white, and black flowing gowns, seated in the wooden chair, the image that became her brand, her Coca-Cola—the image of the artist being present.

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A common criticism of giving money to people who ask on the street is the assumption that the “panhandler” will spend money on booze or drugs, a thing deemed nefarious by those who would ignore the outstretched hand. But isn’t that what we do? We spend our money on the items that bring us pleasure—a glass of wine or an ice cream cone? But the difference is that I earned that money and can spend it on whatever I choose! Yet must we, as humans, earn a good feeling? There have been many times I didn’t earn a Coke at the end of the day, when I behaved like an asshole, or I just felt self-indulgent.

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In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) runs out of spare change, trying to make a payphone call to the White House to warn of an impending unauthorized nuclear strike against the Soviet Union by a rogue US general. He convinces a colonel to shoot the lock off a Coke machine so he can use its coins for the war room call. The colonel tells him he’ll have to “answer to the Coca-Cola company,” revealing a concern for private property over impending Armageddon.

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There’s a man I see on the road when I take my kids to the bike park. He spends hours at a busy intersection, holding out a Coca-Cola cup toward drivers’ windows. In the summer, he often walks the street without shoes. In the winter, he squints into the white, wearing a dirty ski jacket. When I put my window down and drop a couple of bucks into his cup, he says “God bless you darlin’,” or “Thank you, sweetheart, you take care.” Every day, dodging traffic, he reminds us, in our SUVs and luxury sedans, that life doesn’t work the same way for everyone. While we’re hustling our lives away to afford basic necessities like housing, we’re pricing this man out of a place to live. Sometimes, I need that reminder to be able to ask myself the important questions. I need art for the same reasons. Are we not overindulging in big vehicles and huge houses, shopping our way to temporary happiness, driving animal species to extinction and stuffing landfills for a few moments of pleasure? Experts say the reward of dopamine from a can of Coke is similar to that of heroin, like receiving an Amazon delivery or a few hearts on Instagram. Who am I to judge how the man at the intersection spends his money? Because once I give it to him, it’s his money. I have no more say in how he spends it than I do over how Jeff Bezos spends the fifteen dollars I just gave him for new socks.

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Scholars have speculated that Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present was impactful due to a feeling of shared humanity and vulnerability, the intimacy created by Abramovic’s eye contact with each participant. On the subject of eye contact, one participant said, “most of us are afraid of it and Marina is offering it infinitely.” Many who saw the show came away feeling seen, like they’d been included in something larger than themselves, something special. Marina calls it unconditional love.

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In 1975, the year I was born, the Pepsi challenge was launched. The rival cola company conducted taste tests and found that more consumers preferred the flavour of their product to Coke’s. They touted this in ad campaigns.

Coke initiated its own tests, which confirmed the results: people preferred the taste of Pepsi. In an effort to regain its position as the world’s favourite soft drink, the company reinvented Coke in 1985 and changed the flavour, announcing a “NEW” Coke. The backlash was immediate. The phones rang and letters piled up—people hated the new Coke and resented that it was even suggested. Consumers demanded the return of the original taste. Coca-Cola was certain their new formula tasted better. They tried to persuade customers to try it, but their efforts failed. In possibly the most successful business fuck-up ever, the company rebranded the original flavour as Coca-Cola Classic and it took off, consistently outselling Pepsi. They continued to sell the New Coke, hoping it would catch on once people knew they could get both the old and the new. It never did and the new flavour was discontinued. People had come to assign value to something the drink represented; the flavour was beside the point.

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In one of my favourite songs, the Violent Femmes talk about wanting a good feeling to stay a little longer. The feeling comes from the presence of a woman who, if she stays, will prolong the singer’s happiness. The idea that the presence or absence of something or someone determines our happiness is both beautiful and terrifying. No wonder so many of us have a happiness problem.

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In 2011, Coca-Cola launched their “Share a Coke” campaign. Over a thousand first names were printed on Coca-Cola bottles in the brand’s iconic font. Ads urged consumers to find bottles with names of their friends and family, to share in the enjoyment of drinking a Coke. Essentially, the company had found a way to get customers to buy Coke for themselves as well as other people. It was a brilliant campaign, successful in many countries. Of course, there were myriad names not included on the list, despite Coke’s efforts to take name popularity and language into account. But if you couldn’t find your name on a bottle, you could visit the online Coke Store and have custom bottles made. Today, you can have custom Coke bottles made for a wedding or a gender reveal party. The Coke Store sells everything from pajamas and calendars to glass sculptures and Coke-branded toys. One T-shirt is printed with the slogan, “Have a Coke and a Smile.”

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Quentin Tarantino sold the screenplay for Natural Born Killers (1994) after he couldn’t get the film made on his own. Much of it was re-written by director Oliver Stone and others, but Tarantino still received credit for the story. In the parts where Juliet Lewis’s character, Mallory, reflects on her childhood with an abusive father, Stone rendered these scenes like a sitcom. He added a laugh track, juxtaposing the horrors of Mallory’s abuse against the lighthearted feel of a serial comedy. Tarantino later said this is where he turned the movie off. I imagine that he felt like Winona Ryder’s character, Lelaina, in Reality Bites (1994), watching her short film turn to commercialized shlock in the hands of TV executive Michael Grates (Ben Stiller).

It was in these sitcom sections of Natural Born Killers that product placement was forever changed. In one scene, Mallory is being sexually abused by her father. In another, a bloody prison riot breaks out. The iconic Coca-Cola polar bear commercial plays on televisions in the background. After the release of the film, Coke executives were horrified to discover their brand had been included in scenes containing extreme violence. But Coke had no recourse—they hadn’t specified the context of the ad’s placement in the movie.

After the Natural Born Killers incident, advertisers began heavily scrutinizing how their products would be used. Today, big brands like Apple have strict guidelines around how their devices are perceived in popular media, like not allowing their use by villains.

Only good guys are allowed to have iPhones.

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When I was growing up, my parents had friends with kids roughly my age. At their house, the adults drank wine and high-quality spirits. I always asked for a Coke, and usually received a warm, flat, off-brand cola from the cupboard—never the fridge. Sometimes, there’d be an ice cube included, but more often the drink was tepid, brown and lackluster. I suspected the family had money—they drove decent cars and took vacations that involved airplanes—but I silently judged their household, parenting, and overall worth as humans based on the cupboard cola. I had become a Coke snob.

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Coca-Cola has imposed its presence on children around the world, providing financial incentives to underfunded schools in exchange for a monopoly on the sale of beverages. One ad campaign shows a Coke machine being installed at a university campus. In a video released on YouTube, the caption explains that Coke is giving out “Happiness” to students. When students insert money in the machine, multiple bottles roll out, furnishing a handful of Cokes for the price of one. Soon, hands emerge from the dispenser, delivering sunglasses, a bouquet of flowers, a balloon animal, a whole pizza, a six-foot sandwich. The “Happiness Machine” video, of course, went viral. The caption at the end inquires, “Where will happiness strike next?” challenging starving students everywhere to plug their money into the local Coke machine in the hopes of scoring a meal.

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When I was in university, I was waiting for the train one afternoon and noticed a young woman with a baby in a stroller. She was my age, too young to be a mom, already exhausted by life. As we waited, the baby (about a year old) started to fuss. It was hot, and the downtown pavement made it feel hotter. The young woman took a Coke from her bag and poured it into the baby’s bottle. I watched the baby chug the drink, waiting to see it burst into flames or have some other dramatic episode right there on the train platform. But the child was unfazed. He didn’t even wince from the carbonation. Even though kids weren’t yet on my horizon, I was repelled by the sight of a baby drinking Coke. It seemed harmful, almost abusive. It later occurred to me that a Coke at the 7-Eleven was cheaper than milk, likely cheaper than formula. And if she’d come from school, Coca-Cola products would have been the only drinks available from the vending machines.

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Coca-Cola has always been closely tied to art and popular culture. The company’s ad campaigns are largely responsible for the image of Santa Claus that we know today. The original Santa was slim and serious. Coke’s images depict a jolly, rotund Santa—fitting for the largest sugar buyer in the world.

Andy Warhol never received a cease-and-desist letter from the company for his famous paintings. Of these pop art pieces, he said “A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum around the corner is drinking.” Warhol’s art was often a commentary on consumerism, and the idea behind the Coca-Cola images was that the wealthiest consumers purchase the same products as the poorest, that a Coke is a kind of unifying cultural symbol, its presence ubiquitous for people of all walks of life.

Coke ads sell an idea, a state of being. They sell togetherness, good times and happiness. Today, 94% of the earth’s population recognizes the Coca-Cola logo. In the last episode of Mad Men, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper is meditating at a tropical retreat when he has an epiphany: it’s a vision of “Hilltop,” the 1971 commercial that introduced the jingle “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” featuring a diverse cast singing about perfect harmony. It was a campaign so universally recognizable, a fictional ad executive could be credited with its creation almost half a century later, and the audience would get it.

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The first time I smoked hash, it was out of a Coke can that had been fashioned into a pipe. I was outside a house party, in the passenger seat of Teresa’s Honda Civic. Her best friend, Colin, was in the backseat. Teresa placed a ball of hash on the side of the aluminium can, into which she’d poked little holes with a Swiss Army knife. She lit the hash and inhaled through the drinking hole, then passed it to me. Before I could take it, she said Shit, I dropped the hash—help me look for it! Using our lighters to illuminate the dark, messy floor of the car, Teresa and I bent down and searched for the hash. This went on for a few minutes, with Teresa cursing the loss of the drugs, the very last bit she and Colin had. Colin grew impatient and said he’d see us inside. When the car door closed behind him, I reached for the door handle and Teresa stopped me: Heidi, I’ve got the hash. Don’t tell Colin. She passed me the Coke can pipe and I coughed my way through the next few minutes, thinking about how far people were willing to go for a good feeling.

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It takes just under three litres of water to make a litre of Coke. In countries like India, already suffering the fallout of drought and water pollution, Coca-Cola has been accused of taking over community aquifers and draining the wells of struggling farmers. In grade four, we did an experiment involving two sets of bean plants. One was given water, the other Coca-Cola. I think Mrs. Jackson was trying to show us the importance of fresh water, but she may have been commenting on the perils of soft drinks as well. She had really great teeth. The Coke-fed bean plants looked brown and wilted. They grew much slower than the ones that received water.

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In San Juan Chamula, Mexico, Coca-Cola is revered as an almost sacred drink. It is used by some of the indigenous Tzotzil shamans in healing ceremonies. At mealtimes, Coke is the beverage of choice. Since the 1960s, the Coca-Cola company has been embedding itself into Mexican culture, offering free refrigerators, signs, and branded furniture to impoverished shop owners in exchange for selling their product. From 2000-2006, Vincente Fox, former CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico, was the country’s president. His first campaign donations came from Coca-Cola. For decades, the company’s billboards have featured local dialects, with models in traditional clothing. The residents of this area have become the most loyal consumers of Coca-Cola on the planet, drinking an average of two litres of the stuff per day. Mexico is already the largest consumer of Coke per capita, but the people of Chamula drink five times as much as the rest of the country. Coca-Cola is braided into the culture of this town. Coke’s campaign to target indigenous Mexican populations has been so successful 40% of adults in the area are now obese and type two diabetes has become an epidemic. It is the second leading cause of death, after heart disease. Walk through a cemetery in Chamula and you’ll see Coke bottles containing flowers for the dead. When young people become engaged to be married, Coca-Cola is the beverage used for celebration.

In the nearby town of San Cristobal de las Casas, a Coca-Cola factory employs over 400 people. Each day, the factory extracts 300,000 litres of fresh water from underground wells. Most of the people in San Cristobal have limited running water and no sewage infrastructure. Raw sewage drains directly into the spring water available from their kitchen taps. The Coca-Cola factory takes the area’s purest water and sells it back to residents as bottles of Coke. It is cheaper than buying clean, bottled water.

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I never went back to that dentist who told me to get off the Coke. He was a bit of a quack, and I have extreme dental anxiety. My current dentist is a man I’ve been seeing for the past twenty-five years, who specializes in “gentle dentistry.” I once watched him fill three of my then-toddler’s teeth, without freezing or sedation, in less than five minutes. My child didn’t even flinch. Dr. Chan works miracles.

When he asked me about my Coke habit, I laughed maniacally through his gloved fingers in my mouth. Coke is my reward, for a job well done, or just…done, I said. He chuckled and pushed back on his little rollie stool. Are you telling me that at the end of a hard day, when you kick back with a cold one, it’s a Coke? I nodded. He laughed out loud. He thought I was joking. Or maybe he was thinking about how my relationship with Coca-Cola had paid for his golf club membership. The very existence of this product has likely directly contributed to his wealth. In the years I’ve known him, he’s acquired two more dental clinics. If they came out with a dental monopoly game, he’d be the guy in the top hat.

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In 2023, Coke launched a global brand campaign called A Recipe for Magic. The idea centers around the potential for human connection over a shared meal, and much of the creative content features supermodel Gigi Hadid holding a glass bottle of Coke. “Research tells us people wish they could share a meal more often with loved ones and that sharing a meal reminds them of the importance of connecting with others,” says one of the marketing executives quoted on the website. The campaign also claims “86% of the brand’s global shoppers surveyed agreed that Coca-Cola makes any meal better.”

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When I think about the pros and cons of drinking Coke, I justify my habit by relegating it to the category of lesser evil, proclaiming it my only remaining vice in a life where I once had many. Its presence in my life means the absence of other, worse things. I keep a Coke in what my family calls the “butter penthouse,” that compartment with the little door, reserved for butter—the refrigerator’s most exclusive real estate. The door to our butter penthouse makes a groaning sound when opened or closed, letting me know if someone tampers with my stash. The point isn’t always to drink the Coke—it is to know it’s there, should I need it. Sometimes, on those commutes to high school, years ago, I’d take a can of Coke with me and leave it unopened, then carry it back home in my backpack and return it to the fridge for the next day. I needed to know the good feeling was available. The presence of the Coke made all the difference.