Coffee makes you feel strong and mighty, tea makes you feel puny.
Coffee helps you get work done, tea helps you feel better while you’re procrastinating work.
Sure, sometimes maybe you like feeling subservient because you’re respecting cultural traditions like kneeling on tatami mats or reading dusty novels with a blanket over your lap.
When you need to make shit happen coffee has no substitute. It’s bitter. Its bitterness is invigorating. It’s supposed to be bitter, in the same way that wine is bitter and beer is bitter and lemons are bitter (adding lemon to your tea can help).
If you soup up your coffee with cream and sugar (let’s not even get into disgusting flavorings like h—-nut), you might as well have ice cream. Or you could have some coffee yogurt, but this is not the cup of git-er-done that you need.
Despite the bitter edge, if you do coffee right, it’s round and ever-so-slightly sweet, just enough to make your tongue trace your top teeth after each sip and get you lifted onto your toes and make you pound out the next graf/line/exposure/calculation that you need.
Because there’s also caffeine, a good enough amount of it that you can feel it right away, instead of tea’s “oh yeah, I guess there was a bit of a boost in that huge 16-oz. cup that’s just going to make me pee in a few minutes.”
Coffee wins.
What a dichotomy: making shit happen vs making pee happen.