I Switched to Decaf and Life is Suddenly Great

Paul Cantor
5 min readOct 13, 2018
“shallow focus photography of coffee beans in sack” by Tina Guina on Unsplash

Never been a big coffee person. Though I like coffee. Love the smell of it, love the taste, have drunk different coffees in all different parts of the world. In the fridge in my house now, there’s coffee from India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, Italy, Portugal, Hawaii, New Mexico, New Orleans, Puerto Rico and other places I can’t even remember. I buy it when I travel or someone gives it to me after they’ve traveled, and I don’t really spend money on a lot of things, I’m not a big souvenir guy, so coffee is one of the few purchases I’ll make.

And still — the coffee just sits there. Occasionally, I drink it. And I like it when I do, but the whole process of grinding beans, storing it, all that crap, I don’t have the patience. So it sits in the fridge and I mostly drink Maxwell House, Chock Full o’ Nuts or something equally as plain, whatever I can get in the grocery store that looks like something my parents or grandparents drank, and makes me feel unpretentious and not snobby about something as simple and, frankly, ridiculous as coffee. It’s coffee. Like, it doesn’t need to be a science project.

But lately I have been doing something that probably puts me even more at odds with the coffee world. Beyond drinking Maxwell House and store-bought crap that the purists wouldn’t drink even if they were in prison. I have been drinking decaf! I…

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Paul Cantor

Wrote for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vice, Fader, Vibe, XXL, MTV News, many other places.