Five-Hour Energy is one of those products that exists near the back of all of our cultural consciousnesses, at the boundary between “real” products and obvious scams. We might map out that space as bounded on the more legitimate-seeming side by anti-oxidants and on the more scam-like side by the Atkins diet. I’m inclined to push it more toward the Atkins end of things. The round number seems very suspicious to me, for instance — how can they possibly know, amid all the wide variety in human physiology, that the energy boost will last that precise length of time? Further, how can such a product possibly fail to cause cancer?
Their advertising has generally fallen within certain predictable bounds. Do you feel too tired to work out? Take Five-Hour Energy. Do you feel worn out in the afternoons at work? Take Five-Hour Energy to avoid That 2:30 Feeling. The most adventurous they got was a self-mocking campaign in which an adventuring young man mastered dozens of skills within the five-hour window, with a little time to spare.
Lately, though, their ads have taken on a more mystical tone (unfortunately these ads don’t seem to be available on YouTube). Instead of giving you energy or motivation, they’re providing you with focus. They describe focus in terms that would not be unfamiliar to readers of The Cloud of Unknowing, concluding with the enthusiastic declaration: “Focus is life!”
It’s disconcerting to be told that an energy drink is the pathway to a meaningful, centered life, but here we are. It reminds me on one level of Zizek’s critique of “Western Buddhism,” whereby the spirituality of the Eastern world is instrumentalized to help workers cope with the stress of their jobs. While his focus on Buddhism is probably disproportionate, the basic point remains — think of what yoga has become in the US, for instance.
What’s misleading in Zizek’s stance, however, is the implication that supplementing work with spirituality is something new. Agamben’s description of the monastic workday in The Highest Poverty reminds us that there has always been a “zone of indistinction” between work and spirituality in the Christian tradition (and I assume the monks suffering from accedia would have appreciated a bottle or two of Five-Hour Energy). Leaving aside the obvious references to the “Protestant ethic,” we find the same overlap in Marxism, where productive labor is put forth as “the chief end of man.”
In other words, the problem with Five-Hour Energy’s claim that an energy drink meant to help you through the workday is also a mystical experience isn’t that it debases spirituality — it’s that they’re fundamentally on the right track. That really is how our culture thinks about work, even in its most radical self-critique. It’s a Hegelian-Zizekian “infinite judgment,” like “the Spirit is a bone” — “Marxism is a Five-Hour Energy commercial.”
An und für sich 
This is kinda like the talk about transhumanism boiling down to its making us better multitaskers, meaning the übermensch is really just some guy’s secretary. Also, antioxidants are complete bullshit.
But are we to take from this that supplementing work with spirituality is ultimately something bad? I would say that there appears to be more dignity in the spirituality of the monastic setting than in the “mysticism” of the Five-Hour Energy Ad– though is your contention that, in fact, both are a form of obfuscation and this technique is quite old? Are the mixing of spirituality and labour always ideological in the negative sense? Or might we be able to differentiate between better and worse ways of integrating spiritual needs with work?
I’m not trying to make a positive or negative assessment, nor do I have any policy proposal or moral guideline to offer.