The Importance of Bad Coffee
I like coffee. No, I love coffee. For what it brings -- like now, I’m sitting with a cup next to me, thinking and writing. Sometimes it comes with a conversation with my family, or with a friend. Other times it gives me a reason to take a break from a long stretch of work or to pause during a long drive. But I also love it for what it is -- I actually do like the taste, the bitterness and the warmth.
Except, of course, for the times when I don’t. Because … well, sometimes, I end up with a bad cup of coffee.
DJ was one of my students, and he also loves coffee. But he does it on a completely different level -- I would say he is a professional coffee lover. He thinks about everything that goes into a cup: the beans, the grind size, the optimal brewing time, the exact water temperature, and a dozen other things about coffee that I forget. He also reads about coffee, which is how, a few years ago, my lab and I ended up with a coffee book1 he gifted us.
I was curious enough to read it. It was full of insights and tips, many of which were new to me. I have to admit I don’t remember most of it, but one thing stuck with me: a small note praising bad coffee. At first, I thought it was a typo: why would a professional coffee book praise bad coffee? But it wasn’t a typo. It was a genuinely thoughtful note, and for me, it became the main message of the entire book: the importance of bad coffee.
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The coffee book pointed out that bad coffee makes us appreciate good coffee even more. But as I thought more about it, I realized this wasn’t just about bad coffee, but about any unwanted experiences. Despite them being unwanted, they do actually matter in our lives, and there are several reasons why they do.
The first would be the one pointed out in the book: bad coffee helps keep our expectations realistic. In everyday life, we often build assumptions about how things should be: quiet mornings, reliable routines, consistently good coffee. But research on perception and judgment shows that expectations keep going up over time unless something interrupts them2. A disappointing cup can act as a reset, reminding us that variation is normal and that not every experience will end up meeting a high bar. In turn, this removes the pressure we place on daily life and makes us more adaptable. When our expectations stay flexible, we respond to small frustrations and occasional failures with more ease, and we end up appreciating good moments even more, without assuming they are guaranteed.
Then there is the hedonic wheel: happiness doesn’t operate on a continuously rising curve, it resets. Studies show that humans have a psychological “set point” for happiness3, and repeated exposure to the same positive stimulus eventually leads to smaller and smaller emotional returns4. And so it matters to allow happiness to reset, by occasionally having less-than-ideal experiences, which helps maintain our capacity to appreciate simple pleasures. Economic research also consistently finds that beyond a certain income threshold, more money does not meaningfully increase happiness5. In fact, people with fewer resources often report equal or higher daily happiness, possibly because they experience and appreciate a wider spectrum of quality -- coffee included. Bad coffee, in its own way, keeps us from adapting too quickly and preserves the joy of the good cup that follows.
Trying bad coffee expands our experiential range. Perception research shows that categorization depends on exposure to varied examples6; eventually, the formation of preferences for one category versus another would require the entire spectrum of experiences, not just the ideal ones. Bad coffee is still a category of coffee, and tasting it gives us data (sensorial, emotional, contextual) that will help refine our understanding of what we like. Novel experiences, even unpleasant ones, also activate neural circuits associated with learning and curiosity. In other words: a bad brew can still contribute to our taste and perspective.
These unwanted experiences are in fact opportunities to learn. As it happens, learning theory shows we often learn more from the bad times than from the moments when everything goes right, as unexpected outcomes lead to memory consolidation and improved decision-making. Bad coffee teaches us to look for different beans, notice the brewing details, or simply pay more attention to what we enjoy. This is very much like how computers learn: machine learning models improve not by seeing only positive examples, but by being exposed to the full range of outcomes, including the negative ones. Similarly, our internal “model” of what makes good coffee -- and good moments -- requires occasional outliers. Without the bad examples, the good ones lose meaning and thus learning and improvement become impossible.
Finally … it’s all about the process, not the outcome. Psychological research on mindfulness shows that focusing on the present -- the actual steps of an activity, not the future outcome -- reduces stress and enhances overall satisfaction7. A predictable good cup may become routine, but a bad cup makes us aware again, and gets us to look more closely at the steps that got us there and the steps that can take us to the next good cup. It reminds us that the value might be in the act of making (or getting) the coffee, not only in the taste of the resulting cup. In this way, bad experiences help reinforce a process-oriented mindset, which is strongly associated with long-term well-being.
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You’d say: “But hey, I’m not even a coffee lover. So why should I care about bad coffee at all?” The point isn’t the coffee -- it’s that bad coffee shows up everywhere in our lives, even for people who don’t drink any. And the good news, if we can call it that, is that there is absolutely no shortage. Life gives us endless opportunities for things to fall short, to surprise us in the wrong way, to remind us that not everything will match the image we had in our heads.
We’ve all had our versions of bad coffee. An SAT exam that didn’t go the way we hoped. A robotics competition where we invest hours of building and testing, only to have the robot refuse to run at the last moment. A soccer game we walk into ready to win, only to lose by a large margin. A grant application we spent weeks polishing, only to see it rejected. Even an exciting invitation -- say, to give a TED talk -- that suddenly disappears when we’re not selected after all. These are all forms of bad coffee, served to us periodically, whether we want them or not.
And just like a bad cup of coffee, these moments aren’t pleasant, but they play their role. Once we learn to see them for what they are -- expectation normalizers, happiness resetters, learning moments, and reminders to focus on the process -- they become those much needed ingredients for a happy, successful, and resilient life.
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What to do next time when you get bad coffee?
You won’t like it. I know I don’t. Somehow, we never really grow to enjoy bad coffee, and that’s okay. Even though it’s unpleasant in the moment and leaves a bitter taste, it pays off in the long run. It increases our capacity for joy, builds resilience, and, I’d venture to say, makes us a little happier overall.
So … enjoy your next cup of bad coffee!
1. Hoffmann, J. How to Make the Best Coffee at Home: Sunday Times Bestseller from World-Class Barista. (Mitchell Beazley, 2022).
2. Helson, H. Adaptation-level theory. (1964).
3. Diener, E., Lucas, R. E. & Scollon, C. N. Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being. Am. Psychol. 61, 305–314 (2006).
4. Sheldon, K. M. & Lyubomirsky, S. The challenge of staying happier: testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 38, 670–680 (2012).
5. Kahneman, D. & Deaton, A. High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107, 16489–16493 (2010).
6. Nosofsky, R. M. Attention, similarity, and the identification–categorization relationship. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 115, 39–57 (1986).
7. Keng, S.-L., Smoski, M. J. & Robins, C. J. Effects of mindfulness on psychological health: a review of empirical studies. Clin. Psychol. Rev. 31, 1041–1056 (2011).