By Samuel Owino
DISCLAIMER: I do not promote or encourage addiction. This piece is satirical.
This is a question I have been asking myself for the last year since I started using Coke. Not to be misinterpreted by cocaine, No! No! No! I mean the soda beverage Coca-Cola. I have been drinking way too much of it ever since I started intentionally minding the food I eat; that I learnt from my physical education class.
I saw in an advertisement last year from the billboard that you can usually see from class at the DAC block when you are zoning out, or looking away from the lecturer so that they do not point at you to answer a question. Anyway on this billboard, it said, “Coca-Cola brings you happiness.” I thought about it for a long time and went out to test if Coca-Cola really brings one happiness.
After that class, I bought a 500ml bottle of Coca-Cola soda and drank it with really high expectations: an instant mood booster, instant relief, and a moment of happiness, much like you see in the advertisements. I was extremely disappointed that none of these things happened even though I doubted that it would deliver.
I kept buying Coca-Cola every chance I got to prove the advertisement right and over time it was the only soda I could have. I tried going back to the other sodas but none of them gave me satisfaction of any sort. This couldn’t be true, it didn’t bring me any happiness but it was a kind of bond I had established with this beverage. Soon after I was drinking this soda whenever I felt low, whenever I felt good, whenever I tried to avoid the temptations of trying alcohol. It was my go-to drink now.
Being with my friends too made me realize this addiction. They are usually stunned by just how much soda I can have in a day. Just today, by 3 pm I had already had three cans of soda— I could start as early as 8 am— and this led me to reflect on how much of this soda I take.
This also got me thinking about how far advertisement goes and its importance to the customer. I really did start drinking Coke because of an advertisement. I wonder how different my life would be if I had never been in a class in DAC and what other mediocre (in my opinion) drinks I would have been drinking. Would I have thought of them as mediocre? Would I even like soda at all?