Cheap Tea (2026)

Cheap tea is either a ritual turned into a commodity, or a commodity turned into a ritual, it’s hard to tell so far. In any case, it is a ritual, a performance, a concert, a tea party. With cheap tea.

Almost any kind of ritual, mindfulness practice, or meditation requires some form of direct or indirect consumerism. Even if you don’t buy a gadget that plays ocean waves, you still have to “buy” time, carving it out from other duties in order to switch off. But most of us are poor and only have cheap tea to work with.

Modern economies are built on efficiency, leaving little room for artistry in the financial landscape. Art is an inherently inefficient endeavor, wasteful even. Tea production, however, has benefited immensely from this focus on efficiency, allowing many underprivileged people to access admittedly low-quality tea bags at a very low cost.

These are more or less the same cheap teas we drank as children, and that many, especially the poor and the urban, still drink today. Growing up, we may develop a kind of comfort-food nostalgia toward them, or perhaps it’s something closer to a Stockholm-syndrome-like attachment. Any way, sometimes we just can’t resist.