As a child, I can vividly remember thinking how utterly moronic it is to smoke. Just why on Earth would anyone decide to ignite and inhale from a tube packed full of carcinogenic nastiness? It just didn’t make sense. Maybe it was the barbed hook of nicotine which snared its victims, its addictive power on a par with harder, more frightening vices. Or maybe it was because significant sections of the population really did think smoking was cool, that it marked out the smoker as a rogue, refusing to buckle under countless health warnings and punitive tax rises. Years later, at the age of twenty-three and an upsetting number of cigarettes smoked since, I’ve been finding myself asking the same question: why do people smoke?

Over the last three months or so I have desperately been trying to kick the habit. It’s been a relative success, with large stretches of abstinence punctuated by brief relapses, typically on a night out where one cig leads to ten more – once you’ve cracked for the evening, “you might as well relent to the nihilism” is the blatantly flawed justification.

Many people (including myself, up until recently) refer to themselves as ‘social smokers’, as if it distances themselves from the twenty-a-day life long smokers who reach for a Chesterfield Black first thing in the morning. And in the sense that a person’s smoking intensity does lie on a spectrum, consisting of a cig here and there on one extreme to two plus packs a day on the other, they’re technically right. But it has become patently clear to me that social smoking is just as absurd and self-defeating as an unrelenting daily habit.

Many will have read this far and will be thinking “well OF COURSE any level of smoking is stupid”. Usually these people are those who have had the foresight and smarts to never light up, and to them the reasons people smoke are as baffling as they were to a younger me. The reasons people start and continue to smoke are numerous, and so I can only answer my opening question from a personal perspective, but I suspect they’re applicable to many smokers, especially those from a similar background to myself.

Why people first start to smoke is as obvious as it is tragic: impressionable teenagers mistake smoking as a sign of maturity. A cancerous ember resting between a fifteen-year old’s lips is sadly mistaken as a marker of independence, as a signifier that the transition from child to adult has been achieved. A sizable fraction of teenagers try smoking at least once, and a significant fraction of them continue into adulthood – 16.9% of adults in the UK smoke according to the latest figures. As already mentioned, the reasons why people continue to smoke are many, complex and depressing, but in my case, a key reason is found in the label ‘occasional’ smokers like to attribute to themselves: ‘social smokers’.

Over the course of my later teenage years and early twenties, the act of smoking has insidiously entangled itself with the very act of socialising. From going to the pub to having a chat at the end of the day with a housemate, the act of rolling and smoking has become enmeshed with social engagement. As we humans are a hyper social species, socialising is essential to a person’s well-being, and when an act appears to facilitate such a crucial function, a dangerous link is made in a smoker’s brain.

Breaking this link is bloody hard, as I’ve discovered over the last few months. At first it took significant willpower to simply sit in a pub and do what most ordinary pub-goers tend to do – buy alcohol, consume alcohol, and talk, aided by alcohol. Going to the pub and smoking was a given; you wouldn’t set foot in any tavern in the land without a box full of rolling gear and a trusty lighter. A few months on, the pub-smoking link has greatly diminished, although occasionally an overwhelming, if fleeting, urge to light up has to be beaten down into submission.

It’s a work in progress, with blips inevitable along the way to achieving an entirely smoke free existence. But already unexpected positive results are being noticed; certainly, I feel physically healthier, but mentally as well there’s been a noticeable change. A large part of my smoking habit in the past has been borne out of a low-grade nihilism – the notion that I’m young, seemingly (although obviously not) indestructible and going to die someday anyway, so why the hell not. But this way of thinking has its roots in a certain lack of self-worth, at least subconsciously. It’s 2018, and every smoker in the western world is well aware of the litany of diseases smoking causes, but still they smoke. For many the understanding of this destructiveness is blunted by a lack of regard for the thing that the action destroys: themselves. The act of not smoking is, for me, gradually becoming bizarrely thrilling. To be in a social environment (or any environment for that matter) and not publicly destroy yourself does wonders for your self-esteem. Duh.

So here I am sat on the 2nd of January 2018 having made two resolutions (which should be fairly obvious as to what they are) in the first forty-eight hours of the new year. I broke the first resolution one hour into 2018. Prompted by the disgust I felt the next day, I made another, and even persuaded myself to write my first ever blog post in an attempt to articulate the reasons why I should never light up again. It’s been quite cathartic in a way, and I might write more purely because distilling vague thoughts and general ideas into a permanent, semi-coherent format helps your understanding of whatever it is you’re writing about. It’s also quite fun. So yeah, there might be more to come.

Here’s to us all having a bloody brilliant 2018 (nuclear war, escalating climate change and Trump not withstanding).

Jack x