By Leila Molitor
Most mornings in this city look the same if you pay attention. Half the population is stumbling out of walk-ups clutching iced coffee like it’s a life-preserving organ. Nobody eats breakfast anymore. Not a real one. The idea alone feels old-fashioned, like something your aunt in Jersey still insists on because she has time and a dining table. Here, breakfast is whatever caffeine you manage to inhale between your building’s front door and the nearest crosswalk. You tell yourself you’re “fasting,” which is generous, considering the only thing fasting about you is your bank account after the fifth cold brew.
The funniest part is how proudly people sell this routine. You hear it everywhere. “I don’t get hungry until two.” Sure. That’s not biology. That’s adrenaline bullying your appetite into silence. There’s a whole class of New Yorkers who treat not eating like it’s a TED Talk topic. Meanwhile their hands are shaking, their eyes are buzzing, and their stomach has been filing noise complaints since 9 a.m. But call it “biohacking” and suddenly it feels intentional instead of unhinged.
If you zoom out, it actually makes perfect sense. This city rewards the twitchy, the over-caffeinated, the ones who move like they’re being timed. Food slows you down. Coffee speeds you up. And New York only ever asks one thing of you: keep up or move out of the way. So we drink. We skip meals. We confuse cortisol for clarity. It becomes a system. A rhythm. A survival technique you can almost respect, right up until your heart starts drumming on your ribs like it’s trying to get someone’s attention.
Then comes the crash. You always know when it’s happening because Manhattan gets strangely quiet in your head and every Slack message feels like a personal attack. You look up at the clock and suddenly it’s three, your brain feels like wet cardboard, and you realize you haven’t eaten anything solid since yesterday’s “maybe I’ll cook tonight” lie. That’s when you inhale a bodega sandwich like you were raised by wolves. The shame hits later.
What makes the whole thing very New York is that we know this routine is insane. We know it’s aging us in dog years. We know the city’s collective blood type is basically iced oat milk at this point. But caffeine is the unofficial mayor and denial is the deputy, and you can’t fight City Hall. Every block has a coffee shop. Every office has someone pacing. Every creative studio has a cold brew keg that’s basically an IV drip with branding. The environment makes the habit. The habit becomes the identity.
So no, the five-coffee fasting routine isn’t healthy. It’s survival dressed like self-improvement. It’s a blood sugar hostage situation we romanticize because admitting exhaustion feels like losing. It’s the kind of thing only New York could take pride in. And if you think any of us are giving it up, you must be new, visiting, or lying.
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