The First Drop: Just Bad Enough to Be Good

Make new friends, but keep the old;

Those are silver, these are gold.

If you’re a Girl Scout, that old saying lives deep in your heart.

If you’re the Coca-Cola Co., you’ve reworded it a bit, I’m sure, to account for Diet Coke.

Buy new brands, but look at the old,

The can of silver has turned to gold.

That’s right. Diet Coke has become the drink of the moment, the naughty treat, the “Fridge Cigarette” for Gen Z and TikTok creators (and, presumably, all who follow them). It’s not that the brand has taken off from a sales perspective – in fact, last year, on a global basis, more recent introduction Coca-Cola Zero Sugar was up more than 13 percent, while Diet Coke/Coca-Cola Light was only even for the year, according to the company’s annual report.

But there’s sales, and there’s capturing the “Diet Zeitgeist,” and that’s what’s happened with Diet Coke. In fact, the silver can has only become more of an object of desire as the ongoing war in Iran has compressed Persian Gulf aluminum exports. It doesn’t happen every time, but scarcity can lead to objectification, and it seems that’s at least a contributing factor here.

Now, I never gave up my Diet Coke, but for the new enthusiasts, it seems like one key driver isn’t so much visual as auditory: the sound of a newly cracked cold can is a signal that you’re just plain taking a break, and it beats the old alternative of the cigarette break.

Or does it? Because cigarettes are apparently cool again, as well.

The past couple of years (maybe it was the good looking, tobacco-hound cast of The Bear, maybe it was tension brought on by The Trump) have seen something of a rebound in real cigarette usage, with a pronounced rise in visible celebrity and civilian smoking pics on social media (your mom would be So! Ashamed! if she saw your Instagram).

Fewer than 10% of Americans smoke (even if it seems like all the really cool ones do), although there’s the possibility that replacing older smokers with younger, attractive ones will lead to a potential rebound of some kind. But we are living in a time when we reject life-saving vaccines, so it’s clear that the medical establishment’s judgment on smoking will probably be called into question.

What are we to make of a cultural shift in which the old signal of virtue – Diet Coke, that less fattening sugar-free alternative to “The Real Thing” – is now a signal of acceptable vice? Certainly, there’s a tongue-in-cheek aspect to it that we also see from Liquid Death and Garage Beer, an understanding that the product itself isn’t as important as its context. Diet Coke falls into that space pretty well – if that’s the only vice of the clean living, all-American influencer, she’s doing pretty well, right? I mean, some of these folks are so in tune with their bodies that I wouldn’t begrudge them the occasional smoke, either (they’re probably riding the Zyn train anyway).

But another view is that we haven’t really gotten that far in terms of our sophistication as consumers, and that any product can be made into something sexy when cracked by fingers sporting gelled nails and accompanied by the soft coo of a perfectly-lit influencer, and that the same charismatic clout driving the fridge cigarette is also re-igniting the cultural cool of the real cigarette, the manosphere, the alt-right, the extremist views that are returning from all sides. Sex sells, and we’re all buying.

That’s a scary thought, but it carries some weight. After all, surrounding potentially bad ideas with good looking people has been the main thrust of ad spend for hundreds of years, regardless of medium. So that’s good news for the marketers, at least. For the rest of us, the era of the fridge cigarette might be a prelude to the revival of something far stronger.

But I don’t necessarily see it that way. The last time we saw a legacy brand hit the cultural conversation like this it was La Croix, which drove millions of calories out of people’s diets. Seeing things that have been good – or not that bad, anyway – for many years come back in vogue is one of the great pleasures of the cultural observer. After all, how would we have gotten through Covid without, among other things, the revival of the Sea Shanty? As time moves forward, all it does is leave us with those kinds of cultural artifacts. I guess the key is whether we’re able to evolve and understand why we might have left some of them behind. It’s worth considering while enjoying your next break, no matter which old friend you’ve chosen to share it with.