The Optimum Number of Lifetime Cigarettes is Probably Not Zero
Jade's definitive guide to living life (2/n)
“Jade’s Definitive Guide to Living Life” is a new The Strawberry Gazette series where I explain my original, highly-specific theories about how best to live (not just survive, but thrive!) in a niche facet of life. Today’s edition is on smoking cigarettes, or maybe not? As always, comment, subscribe, smash that like button, etc. You should probably sit this one out, Mom.
Forget silver spoons, nobody comes out of their mother’s womb with a cigarette in their mouth. The implication here is that at some point in their life millions of people in the world make the active choice to try something that firstly tastes revolting and secondly destroys their health (understatement). I don’t know if you’ve ever had a Marlboro Red but that shit kind of tastes like specifically the dregs of Pret Coffee back when it was unlimited for 30 quid a month and so while the consumers exploited the system by screenshotting the subscription QR and sharing it between an entire friend group, the producers exploited the sanctity of Life and integrity of human tastebud receptors by never cleaning the coffee machine and putting a substance out for sale that should have never left the pits of Tartarus (pun intended, etc). In any case, you get my point.
When we think about anti-smoking advertising, we have nudge policies like graphic pictorial warnings with a rotting foot and just general educational campaign “Smoking Kills” and anti-addiction info, which is factual and valid. True but misses the point. Kids don’t just stumble upon cigarettes. While a teenager might develop a terrible porn addiction because of boobalicious pop-up ads and his primed-for-manosphere all-boys’ school classmates, it doesn’t work the same way for smoking.
Around this time last year, I was looking at a blog on trying zootropics / general cognitive enhancement self-experiments, and the surprising thing about nicotine is that the substance itself does not have that many adverse effects other than raising blood pressure. Why smoking (and vaping for that matter) is so harmful is specifically because of the act of burning releases carbon monoxide, as well as the tar that goes into your lungs (hence, black lungs). But my point is that if nicotine and addiction and so on and so forth is truly what appeals to people from the outset, non-smokers putting on nic patches and chewing gum would be much more prevalent (I’m reminded of the amusing anecdote of the guy who puts on nic patches only when he exercises to Pavlov himself into forming that habit). By the way, I’m not doubting how addictive nicotine actually is, because I’m pretty sure the answer to that is a lot (at least 3 times more than cannabis). I’m just saying the appeal of the first cig is really not the nic. At some point it becomes the nic, because such is the nature of being addicted to substances, but it is not the nic that makes people start.
I was studying with Cait in Little Louie the other day when a familiar scent lit up my brain neuroses. Chinese cigarettes. Interestingly enough, while I have never had a Chinese cigarette, my keen nose and ethno-nationalist instincts have rendered it second nature for me to notice when a cigarette of Chinese origin is within a 30-metre radius. Kidding, I’m thoroughly #Majulah as of December. And as much as US Senators and racist subgroups in Singapore hope otherwise, Singapore is not a Chinese state.
Point being: when I was a child, I used to steal the Chinese cigarette packs around my house in Chengdu (my extended family smokes), and hide them because I am/was irrationally terrified of their mortality. Since cigarettes were like 5 yuan per pack back then or whatever pocket change it was to keep that 10% yoy GDP growth going, that act of thievery was a nothing burger. But the thing is: if my 96-year old grandpa who lived through the Cultural Revolution wants to light up a ciggie to pair with his daily shot of baijiu, who’s gonna stop him? 8-year old me can try, but I was too much a child then to get the point that the difficulty of his life was certainly proportionate to that indulgence (among others). Also clearly the longevity / mortality thing wasn’t much of a concern after all.
But the reason why seeing my grandpa shakily reach into his pocket to pull out a pack and a shot glass is so cool is because, well, he’s not trying to be anyone else. For many teenagers, the appeal of a cigarette is primarily not just performative but emulative, which Kian expounds on over here. You’re on a balcony, you have a cig clenched tightly between your second and middle finger and suddenly you’re Anthony Bourdain after a gruelling work shift trying to burn off some steam. Take this passage from Kitchen Confidential:
One weekday, a large wedding party arrived, fresh from the ceremony: bride, groom, ushers, family and friends. Married up-Cape, the happy couple and party had come down to P-town for the celebratory dinner following, presumably, a reception. They were high when they arrived. From the salad station at the other end of the line, I saw a brief, slurry exchange between Bobby and some of the guests. I noticed particularly the bride, who at one point leaned into the kitchen and inquired if any of us "had any hash." When the party moved on into the dining room, I pretty much forgot about them.
We banged out meals for a while, Lydia amusing us with her usual patter, Tommy dunking clams and shrimp into hot grease, the usual ebb and flow of a busy kitchen. Then the bride reappeared at the open Dutch door. She was blonde and good-looking in her virginal wedding white, and she spoke closely with the chef for a few seconds; Bobby suddenly grinned from ear to ear, the sunburned crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes growing more pronounced. A few moments later she was gone again, but Bobby, visibly trembling, suddenly said, "Tony! Watch my station," and promptly scooted out the back door.
Ordinarily, this alone would have been a momentous event. To be allowed to work the busy broiler station, to take the helm -- even for a few minutes -- was a dream come true. But curiosity got the better of all of us remaining in the kitchen. We had to look.
There was a fenced-off garbage stockade right outside the window by the dishwasher, that concealed the stacked trash and cans of edible waste the restaurant sold to a pig farm up-Cape, from the cars in the parking lot. Soon, all of us -- Tommy, Lydia, the new dishwasher and I -- were peering through the window, where in full view of his assembled crew, Bobby was noisily rear-ending the bride. She was bent obligingly over a 55-gallon drum, her gown hiked up over her hips. Bobby's apron was up, resting over her back as he pumped away furiously, the young woman's eyes rolled up into her head, mouth whispering, "Yess, yess ... good ... good ..."
While her new groom and family chawed happily on their flounder fillets and deep-fried scallops just a few yards away in the Dreadnaught dining room, here was the blushing bride, getting an impromptu send-off from a total stranger.
And I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef.
Reading Bourdain feels like a ginger shot going straight up your nose in the best way. But just as a hot affair with a blushing bride in the back (and from the back) doesn’t make you a chef, smoking doesn’t make you Bourdain, or even remotely as cool as Bourdain. Ironically, in fact the act of doing something to be like someone is fundamentally lame and cringe, especially if your life is not that hard and you’re not doing anything interesting. Bourdain and my grandpa have some solid justifications to be hooked onto a relaxant/stimulant. Most teenagers living in first-world countries simply do not. Emulation without substance. It’s like the “Spell Pharaoh” TikTok that went viral all those years ago. If your hobbies are doomscrolling and staring into the mirror, you are not Frida Kahlo, you are Narcissus, but not even hot. This applies for most things, but specifically for smoking for the aesthetic (especially if you get hooked). You’re not in a Wong Kar Wai movie bro, you’re outside 7/11 frothing at the mouth for someone over the age of 21 to spon you a rokok. Empty, soulless, desireless.
Whenever peer pressure is brought up in mainstream discourse, it’s engaged with in this weirdly uncritical manner. My gripe is that the treatment of peer pressure is applied inconsistently. It’s arguable that most people go to university because of peer pressure, because “everyone is doing it” as opposed to it being a conscious decision that would be best for your personal development. But no one is castigating anyone for majoring in Bsc Finance and Economics, even though that would damage your life prospects more irrevocably than a million cigarettes (though, knowing the type, they’re likely doing both).
Personally, I opine that when people smoke, it is not precisely because it looks cool, but because fundamentally people have this desire to be seen and not seen, in a very Sartre The Look way. This is also why I have this deep-seated hatred of vaping, because it’s just too casual and cheap and accessible. It’s the situationship of smoking. Commit to the bit or commit suicide.
The first time I had a cigarette was because of a boy (yes, yes, my fault, rip me to shreds, burn me at the stake of feminism, whatever). The diabolical part of this delayed-release peer pressure was that at the time of the cigarette, I hadn’t had contact with him for a year. When we were still friends, whenever he would light up a cigarette around me, I would get mad and force him to snuff it out immediately, just like I did with my grandpa. But a year of silence in, I missed him so bad that I was willing to let gutter coffee tar sear my lungs so I could gain some new understanding previously ungraspable and inconceivable to me about why he wanted to smoke so badly. So dramatic. I coughed, threw up, went to sleep, then threw up again the next morning. But that one (or two) cigarettes did make me understand, to whatever limited capacity I could, the general sense of hopeless disregard for long-term prospects that came with his pain. That was a way of seeing, or at the very least an attempt to Look on my part. Also, before you think you know everything about me, while this anecdote was a matter of the heart, it was not a matter of romance. #IContainMultitudes
Picture a less specific and pained scenario: for instance, intimately sharing a cig on slanted just-rained streets of Edinburgh, unencumbered by the noise of life and the passing cars. It’s late, everyone is home, and the warm glow is pouring out of the cobbled walls. The air is cold, your hands are warm. For that ten minutes, you’ve created a moment with your dearly-loved interlocutor. You two have this arbitrary, completely non-essential space to either be vulnerable or silent (dealer’s choice), but either way, you’re fully focused on the act of smoking and the shared creation of the moment. You’re not going out to eat (essential) or for coffee (impersonal) or watching a movie (recreational but still ultimately functional). You’re locked in on that moment of intimacy. You’re fully focused, because if you’re not careful you might just set something on fire. Either way, there’s that creation of a Moment, of Being Seen. Of course it hits. It’s a billion-dollar industry that can’t even be culled by dead bodies on cig packs or exorbitant taxation. It is MADE to hit. The root of its INCEPTION is desire.
But as you can see, the point isn’t the cig. The point is the Moment of being Seen, which has been something that is increasingly less of a thing. We stare at computer screens instead of people. The ubiquity of mobile phones has created this need to “do something with your hands” constantly, which is why you scroll rapidly on the elevator when there’s someone there, even though there’s no signal, instead of speaking to them. In my opinion a cigarette is a better alternative to a phone when it comes to holding something in your hand, because it’s physical and it creates these real, contained moments of connection (which is why vapes are the worst of the worst). Smoking as an activity satiates this innate craving of real connection, and it would do peer pressure discourse (as well as anti-smoking advertising) a lot more favours to recognise that that is the Point, not some sort of menacing peer figure telling you “smoke or I’ll throw your Rainbow Loom bracelet out of the window of the school bus” (Kayson Q, you will not be forgiven).
At the same time, it’s pretty easy to notice that cigarettes and smoking are obviously not the only way to get to experiencing the Creation of the Moment and the Look. Besides, the burn time of 1 cig is approximately 2 minutes. Even if you finish a pack, that’s only half an hour. In response to our anxiety and desires to be seen, Big Tobacco creates temporary relief, then more anxiety — this time, it’s chemically manufactured in the form of withdrawal symptoms. While all our desires are obviously already capitalised on, it is particularly insidious when it comes to things like addiction. Maybe my point is that it is kind of sad how people just want to be looked at properly and that desire devolves into the misery of lung cancer, addiction and harm and destroying yourself and other people. 30% of people who try cigarettes get hooked, but the root of addiction is and has always been a lack of fulfilment in one’s life. Hypothetically, one could try cigarettes and not get addicted and reap the benefits of the creation and sharing of these crystallised moments, ergo the optimal number is not zero. But if you’re already an anxious or sad person, or pre-disposed to thinking things like “I just need a cig / I just need an outlet”, I really wouldn’t take the crapshoot, because there’s a heavy nonzero possibility that you’re going to mess your life up big time. And wouldn’t you like something more real, more permanent?
But what are the alternatives? I’ll use the White Lotus Season 3 to show you, briefly, but these points will likely all be elaborated on in further instalments of this series.
Get off that damn phone. May or may not make an article about this later on but we shall see, because right now my hands are completely tied by my laptop’s screen deciding to spontaneously commit seppuku.
Good sex. But we all know this is reasonably elusive so shrug
Is it crazy that I’ve had this exact conversation with someone? Don’t vape. If you vape you’re going to be reincarnated as an animal in your next life, like specifically one of those cows that when you look into their big sad eyes there’s nothing behind them, but at least they get to satisfy their need for constantly accessible oral fixation by chewing on some highland grass before they’re slaughtered for steak.
Don’t do party drugs. I’m so serious. No spoilers for White Lotus S3, but seriously, do not do it. LIKE, SERIOUSLY. Escapism is stupid and a coward’s game.
Just fucking lock in. Do not watch porn. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Lean into aging. Hug your friends and do not shit talk them behind their back. Love your mom. Resist the urge to have a smoke because that you would give you less time with the people you love. Don’t commit fraud. Convert to Buddhism in a non-white-saviour way. Never kill yourself.
yeah i like this
i came from twitter but wow this is... wow... speechless... 👏