Life's short. Stay awake for it.

I love coffee, tea, chocolate, cola- anything that will get me up in the morning and out the door to early bird. Many of my friends and I are huge fans of Caribou Coffee, and after drinking there for years, I just started thinking about their slogan: "Life's short. Stay awake for it."

At first read, this slogan is effective and charming by implying that because life is short, you shouldn't waste time being tired, and that Caribou Coffee will help keep you from the richness of life. Besides being a very good marketing campaign, this slogan addresses America's addiction to caffeine and fast-paced lives.
I know that I, as well as many other American Studies students, have addressed this topic before, but I'd like to give a new hypothesis as to why we consume so much caffeine.
In addition to drinking coffee as a means of staying awake, coffee drinkers have also started using their coffee cup as a status symbol; it is now a way of saying "Look at me, I have coffee in my hand because I have important things to do, and I need to stay awake for them."
According to Ronald Troyer and Gerald Markle of Drake and Western Michigan University, "coffee confers adult status, since children are not allowed to drink it" (Coffee Drinking: An Emerging Social Problem?) These two professors suggest that coffee drinkers not only drink it for a boost of energy, but also as a way to distinguish themselves between adolescent and adult.
I have to agree with this hypothesis. More and more high schoolers drink coffee, and if you ask us why, almost all of us will say it's because we're tired; we're tired because we didn't get enough sleep, and we didn't get enough sleep because of our jam-packed schedules, and tremendous amount of school work.
Don't get me wrong, I know that many highschoolers are constantly short on sleep because of our work and activities, but is it possible that we use coffee as way of not only staying awake, but also as a way of reminding the world of how we work?