I picked this up at Costco because… well, just because it was there and I was curious, and I got it in the middle of Fermentember, when I was trying ferments.

 

For those who don't know what a jun is, it is a fermented tea beverage much like kombucha. Like kombucha, it is fermented using a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). The kombucha and jun SCOBYs are very similar, but one has been adapted for black tea ferments (the kombucha). The jun uses green tea.

 

All of these ferments produce small amounts of alcohol as a by product, and so I tend to save kombucha for days when I want to get drunk, because I don't metabolize alcohol well. Nonetheless, I got a pack of these because… I guess I wanted to see?

 

Luckily for me, these are much less non-alcoholic than a lot of the kombuchas on the shelf. These were, in fact, crisp and delightful. There is definitely green tea in them, and they add a bunch of adaptogens, but they don't really tell you how much is in there, so I will put it in the column of “this is more of a marketing gimmick than actual amounts that have been scientifically suggested to have an effect.”

 

They are good! Are they worth the price, even at the Costco discount? Enh… Well, look, if I think about the cost of tea per ounce made with leaves, and these… These are not a replacement for tea. They're a drink. They're a drink with tea in them, and they're sparkling and have very little sugar, so that's kinda cool, if you like that kind of thing, and I do, but I'm not sure I like it well enough to make this a regular occurrence in my life.

I got a variety pack of juni from Costco. You can also get them directly from their website, but Costco was $18 for a 12 pack and that's a pretty unbeatable price.

I went through a period of despair and hopelessness in my late teens and early twenties, spanning the first and second times I failed out of college. I don't want to go into details, but I often thought that it was impossible for things to get better, and there were some years where it felt like I was right. I wondered, often, if there was any point in hoping, because it would only inevitably lead to disappointment.

 

The thing that got me out of it was probably, among other things, hormonal changes settling as I came into adulthood, but also because I remember there was a point where, in the throes of despair, I made a decision: maybe everything was hopeless, but there was no way to find out for sure without trying.

 

So I started with the assumption that things weren't hopeless, and I asked myself: if things aren't hopeless, what would I do? And I did that thing, and either it worked, or I would discover that it did not work, and then I would go back and say, “okay, if things aren't hopeless, I have just learned that a thing did not work. What do I do given that information?"

 

One of the reasons I was able to do this was because it sucked to think that life was hopeless. Hopeless thoughts are exhausting. They're depressing. They make everything so much worse. Regardless of the outcome, I was happier assuming that there was hope. That held true even before I realized that hope was logical and made sense. Hopelessness sucked.

 

Eventually, I got to the point where I found myself completely out of patience with my hopelessness. I'd have a hopeless thought and I'd just roll my eyes and move on. I do not think I have ever stopped having catastrophic thoughts, but I have learned to manage them.

 

There are not many times when I thank my weird brain chemistry for forcing me to learn things, but I have been thinking about this now, because it feels like we are living in a never-ending catastrophe. Military being sent into US cities, with threats to use force. Stephen Miller and Donald Trump announcing that they plan to declare everyone who calls this administration fascists as terrorists. Shootings every day. Haunting stories of people being snatched off the street without any questions and put in horrific conditions. Millions on the verge of losing health care on the verge of being lost; soybean farmers with zero contracts. Our military killing people on international ships without any process. 

 

Things are very, very wrong, and I see a lot of people who are hopeless. There are times when I feel it, too--deep despair because I don't know how we're going to get out of this.

 

And then I remember: hopelessness sucks. We don't know that we can't get out of it, so I assume that we can. I ask myself: what would I do if this were not hopeless?

 

I do that. And I remember that hope is a mental discipline: that they want us to be afraid and hopeless so that we give in.

 

And I'm not giving them what they want.

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