I understand the appeal of certainty. I’ve wanted it my entire life—from growing up in a fundamentalist farming community, to searching for safety in the “best practices” of specialty coffee.

Lately, I’ve been watching the coffee industry twist itself into smaller and smaller certainties, while the problems around us grow more complex. It’s a very human, very now impulse.

These certainties are often expressed in dualistic and antagonistic language, what coffee writer and thinker Fionn Pooler calls out in his interesting piece, Coffee Discourse is Becoming Increasingly Sensationalised. 

The Universal Appeal of Certainty

Certainty. What an addictive thing it is.

To be able to know, without doubt, that what I’m doing is right.

To relax and give my decision power to someone else, as I was taught to do.

To say, the issue is X, Y, Z, and not have a morass of doubt open up inside me that it is also K, D, and J.

More than fifteen years ago I got into coffee in a muddle-headed attempt to find connection outside the walls of the religious community where I grew up. 

I didn’t know then that I also sought this thing: CERTAINTY.

From my externally-informed faith, I transferred the drive to name everything and pin it down and label it. Entering coffee, I sought the mission that would redeem my uncomfortable soul. I stumbled into one of the most complicated international environments in the world (coffee trading in Ethiopia) and had the blind grace to think I could actually effect change… all this when I couldn’t even outline the problem or the metrics by which change would be measured.

Always, I have sought to excise the ambiguity by writing essays which have flown over the world and returned to me many wonderful thoughts from others but never once a simplification of the question.

False Duality or the Uncomfortable Complexity?

In today’s political climate, dualism reins. 

Our choices can be constricted to this party or that one, or to compliance vs. rebellion. 

And certainty—the appearance of it at least—is rewarded with visibility, power, money, and doors opening.

We all like good labels.

But as I’ve grown older and deepened my life and professional experience, certainty eludes me more than ever.

What I have is uncomfortable nuance. The uneasy knowledge that we all are the heroes of our own stories. The real experience that international business, whether from an ESG perspective or not, is far more complicated and risky than I initially thought. A treasure trove of friends on every side have taught me that sometimes the best I can do to understand is to sit in silence and acknowledge that the question, and its potential answers, are perhaps beyond me.

When we seek certainty over complexity, we follow imperfect leaders and anoint them as prophets.

When we lock in on the simple party line, we miss out on the actual stakes and overlook the real problems that need solving.

When we default to the comfort of knowing, the things we know get shallower and shallower.

What Next?

In the coffee industry, there has been a widespread sense of disillusionment expressed by many. This is for many reasons: executive salaries for nonprofit enterprises have ballooned while coffee farmers everywhere are forced out of business. Climate change-driven scarcity looms like a storm cloud on the horizon, and it’s always almost too late to take action. Consolidation and business closures and bankruptcies are everywhere.

I believe that the specialty coffee industry has been harmed by our mixed-up emotional-transactional approach, which for a period of time held dominance in impact-based work and then under post-COVID pressure has folded into mostly price-based work, but with a guilt hangover.

We need clarity on why we are here.

Is it a mission, your coffee career? Or a vocation? A way to earn a living, or to touch the global web of connections that at our core most humans yearn for?

Getting clear on why we’re in this is a great step. Next, get ready for the mess. If we are going to do anything meaningful in this sector in the next twenty years, we have got to stop treating coffee like a religion and start treating it like a business with multiple striations, many players, and an intensely complex and volatile set of variables driving decision-making and consequences.