Why on earth would someone drink black coffee?

I, too, used to consider myself a coffee enjoyer. The rich aroma, the bittersweet taste, the caffeine rush makes for the perfect morning experience to kickstart the day. At local cafes, my go to drinks are the yummy iced mochas and raspberry lattes.

However, my love for coffee is apparently invalid, at least according to the real coffee connoisseurs. As they look upon my inferior palate with disdain, they unflinchingly chug a liquid that's darker than their souls. "What you're drinking is practically dessert," I've been told, and have resigned myself to the accusation since.

I have tried, on several occasions, to drink coffee the way it is "supposed" to be drunk, without the desecration of milk and sugar. And every single time, I was reminded of my own mortality in the form of a gag reflex. As I looked over to my friend dumping spoonfuls of ground coffee straight into the hot water in her cute pink coffee mug, I wanted answers to the fundamental question— why?

Of course, the easiest solution would be to question one of these sadists about their motives. That turned out to be a tried-and-true dead end.  They always answer with, "I like the taste." That's about as believable as someone genuinely enjoying the korolla bhaji that you gingerly swallow down to appease your parents. I'm sorry, but here is no way one can actually enjoy bitter gourd.

On the other hand, you have your sleep deprived cogs in the machine who have far too much to do and not enough time to do them in a heathy manner. With their desperate need for caffeine spikes and the jittery illusion of energy, the pungent taste of their seventh tumbler of death potion is probably the least of their problems.

A personal hypothesis of mine is that black coffee drinkers possess, to an extent, a latent self-loathing that manifests in the form of gustatory masochism. While I have not performed any quantitative analysis to back up my claim, I have received enough affirmative answers to the question "do you hate yourself?" from black coffee drinkers to just know.

While it may be a bitter pill to swallow, its not as bitter as that abomination that they drink so much of.

There is another plausible explanation that may, in all likelihood, be true. Perhaps there actually is an underlying fruity sweetness to quality coffee grounds that is lost on me. The coffee nerds on social media with their thousands of dollars' worth of equipment pulling shots of espresso may have a point as they drone on about citrus or spice notes, with their futuristic sci-fi coded gadgets that probably do marginally improve the taste. All of which is lost on the unsophisticated coffee drinker who finds a long black and an americano identically undrinkable.

Or perhaps there's a whole secret universe of a happy high and creative energy sitting at the bottom of the cup. Who knows.

Whatever the reason may be behind choosing to acclimate to such a drink, if it brings you happiness, there's nothing wrong with it. After all, if you want to harness misery with your own time and money, who am I to judge?