Three Bottles Deep
I’ve walked into Berlin offices where the trash can looked like a Club Mate graveyard—empty bottles stacked like evidence of hours spent at a desk. Three bottles before noon, four by evening, someone talking about their pivot while their hand moved mechanically toward another one. The drink had become oxygen for that world, less a beverage than a ritual. You didn’t drink Club Mate because you were thirsty. You drank it because you had convinced yourself you couldn’t think without it.
The thing about Club Mate is that it doesn’t apologize. It’s bitter, it’s chemical, it doesn’t try to be healthy or artisanal or anything other than what it is: fuel for people who are convinced they don’t have time to rest. In Berlin startup culture especially, it became almost a uniform—the visible proof that you were serious, that you were grinding, that you understood the terms of the game. You could measure how deep someone was in that world by counting the bottles on their desk.
There’s something almost honest about the cycle, if you look at it sideways. You need to stay awake to keep up. You drink stimulants to stay awake. The stimulants make you jittery and wired, so you need more caffeine, or maybe you need something else entirely to calm back down, or you just accept that this is what alertness feels like now. Work until you’re exhausted, drink something that makes exhaustion irrelevant for a few more hours, repeat. Eventually something happens—maybe a successful product, maybe you just burn out and move to a new startup that’s exactly the same as the last one.
I watched people live like that for years. Each day blurred into the last. The bottles piled up. The ideas came and went. Sometimes I wonder if they ever actually tested whether they needed the Club Mate or just needed the feeling that they were doing something serious. A person surrounded by empty bottles looks like they’re working harder, feels like they’re accomplishing more, even if all they’re doing is staying awake.
The real trick was learning how to want something without needing to be chemically stimulated to want it. Most of them never figured that out. They just got better at cycling through different stimulants, different offices, different promises about the next big thing. Berlin was full of them, wired and hopeful and trapped in that particular circuit.