Smoking is the new smoking
“Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don’t do it in front of my kids. I don’t do it in front of my family. And, you know, I would say that I am 95% cured.”
When Barack Obama took office in 2008 he said he would quit smoking. I remember thinking, why? You are about to start what has to be the most stressful, exhausting, and awful job in the world (unless you are only playing golf and giving your billionaire buddies more billions), and you are going to quit smoking now?? I also recall reading that he regularly bummed cigarettes off of the press and interns. According to the BBC, Michelle Obama says Barack quit smoking in 2010, but does it really matter? As Time points out, Obama had “the best health care and the lousiest gig in the world” so he was allowed to light up whenever he wanted.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, we all smoked. And at my first job in the late 90s there was a smoking room inside the building. I quit smoking in the early 2000s. I liked smoking and never really thought I would quit. Because I was supposed to, I tried to quit a few times and when I finally did, I just stopped.
I am not sure I ever really quit smoking. Like Barack, I sometimes sneak a ciggy.
In 2018 or 2019, I bought a pack on vacation. I hadn’t smoked in, say, 15 years, but I liked the idea of a vacation smoke. I had a couple on vacation and then a couple in subsequent summers. Each New Year’s Eve, I thought about smoking one, but usually didn’t because it was too cold outside. I finished that pack of cigarettes last year. I’d forgotten about them and found the last five in a cigarette case I got in Vienna. So I smoked them. They were fine.
At my college, there is a small group of full time professors who are part-time smokers—not daily, but sometimes on weekends and always at social events. And, more often than not, I find myself with them.
Now, before you get all judgy and disgusted, we almost always share a cigarette (you can judge and disgust that if you want), and I rarely smoke more than half of one in a night. I just can’t.
I’ve noticed this kind of I-am-not-a-smoker-but-I-sometimes-smoke behavior is on the rise.
In the recent Netflix series “Vladimir” which is about a middle-aged English professor (Rachel Weiss) who has an infatuation with a younger colleague (Leo Woodall), the characters smoke out of boredom, for relaxation, in nervousness, and after sex. The Rachel Weiss character quit years ago, like a proper GenX-er, but her new Millennial situationship demands she revisit her American Spirits. Yellow, please.
Smoking pairs well with the ultra-thin body type that has re-emerged recently. Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa, Kate Moss, Dakota Johnson, and Lana Del Rey all smoke as well as some surprising younger actors such as Daniel Radcliffe who smokes on set because he likes to shock people.
I’ve written before that I believe smoking went out of fashion because leisure went out of fashion. We don’t smoke because we don’t have time. Sure, smoking has health risks, but that’s secondary. The real health threat in our perpetual harvest, grind culture, is not working hard enough and not being rich.
Smoking helps us pass the time and gives us instant community. But we don’t want to pass the time anymore, we want to use it. And we certainly don’t want to talk with anyone when we could be scrolling.
But I think the biggest contributor to smoking’s rising popularity is the same pressure Barack felt when he moved into the White House: we are living in the most stressful, exhausting, and lousiest world right now and, well, it kinda makes me want a smoke.
I haven’t bought a pack of cigarettes since that vacation pack years ago, but I wanted to today. And I’ll probably head over to the cigarettes & lottery store tomorrow. And then, some evening this weekend, I’ll lounge on the patio, using time that I need for nothing else, and have a smoke. Afterall, it’s almost my birthday, and I’m in the waiting room.
