This week’s question comes to us from Mat Honan:

I used to love to smoke. If it weren’t for the whole lung cancer, emphysema, death thing, would you recommend smoking?

You’re forgetting the smell.

Last week I was coming back from the record store and feeling lazy, so I jumped on the bus. A couple of stops after I got on, a dude got on and sat down next to me. Well-dressed dude, also carrying an Amoeba Records shopping bag. Out and about on a Sunday afternoon, doing his record shopping just like me. Within seconds it became clear this dude had just had a cigarette. And he stunk. The bus was also packed at this point, so I was pretty much stuck in that seat until I got off, which luckily wasn’t for too much longer. Also, it feels kinda shitty when you sit down next to somebody on the bus and they immediately get up. (Unless you’re getting a creeper vibe, of course.) I just had to suck it up for a few more stops. But man, it was rough. I’m not trying to disparage the guy or anything. Especially because I used to be that guy, and you used to be that guy, and I’m guessing a lot of our readers used to be that guy. We just walked around smelling awful.

Which is not to say that’s the worst part of smoking, but you took lung cancer, emphysema, and the dead thing off the table. Which leaves us with the smell.

I started smoking my freshman year in college. All reasons to take up smoking are stupid, but this one might be the stupidest. This being the mid-80s our dorm had a cigarette machine in the lobby. One of those old machines you might still see in old man dive bars, with two rows of big ka-chunky knobs, which felt objectively good to pull. It was like you could feel the entire mechanism of the machine come to life when you pulled that knob. And it took some strength to do it! But you could feel the knob hit a gear, you could hear the gear spin, you could feel a pack of cigarettes get pushed free from deep inside the machine. You could hear it slide down a little ramp, and then you’d see it appear down in the landing zone, where you’d push your hand past the trap door, grab it, and somehow have the pack open, and a cigarette in your mouth before the rest of the pack hit your pocket.

If memory serves, a pack of smokes was between $1.25 and $1.50 around that time. (Fun fact, I attempted to Google this and the slop top on the search results page said 26¢ a pack, which is… not true. But please, continue to rebuild society around such amazing technology.) Being the art school miscreants that we were, and also broke, we discovered that if you pulled a knob halfway out, inserted a quarter, and then pulled the knob the rest of the way out it would release a pack of cigarettes. (Ok, that may not have been the actual process, but it was a long time ago, and it’s very close to the spirit of the actual process, so let’s run with it. So I guess we were getting a pack of cigarettes for what Google’s stupid slop robot said, but it included doing crimes.) The knowledge of how to hack the cigarette machine spread through the dorms like wildfire, and soon we were all smoking. Because we were idiots. Also, it felt like we were getting one over on The Man. But mostly because we were idiots.

Also, being art school kids we were very visually-driven people, and all the photos of cool people that we’d hang up in our dorm rooms showed them holding a cigarette. And we very much wanted to be cool people. (True fact: take a photo of Humphrey Bogart, replace the ever-present cigarette with a vape and Humphrey Bogart will look like an herb.) Again, mostly we were idiots.

The vending machine company tried to patch the hack several times, eventually gave up and just took the machine away. This was our first lesson that sometimes doing crime is in the public interest, but that lesson didn’t occur to us right away. At the time, we were just pissed that we had to pay retail for cigarettes again.

By the time I started smoking society was pretty much done with the pretense that smoking was doing anything but murdering you slowly. I know this because we’d sit around in art classes making collages using old cigarette ads where doctors would tell you smoking was good for your nerves, and we would laugh at people for believing this, as we lit cigarette after cigarette. (Yes, you could smoke in class.) And we thought “Boy, our grandparents sure were chumps for believing cigarettes were healthy.” Then we would have a coughing fit. But there was definitely the sense that doing this thing that we all knew had a very very high probability of killing us wasn’t a big deal, mostly because we were in our 20s when nothing can hurt you, Reagan was president and, just to reiterate—we were idiots.

My first post-college job was at a copy shop, and you got one 15 minute break during your shift. Unless you smoked, then you could get as many breaks as you needed. Several people started smoking while working there.

We all stunk. We’d come in from smoking out back, and immediately walk up to the service counter to help a customer. A customer who either stunk as bad as we did, or had become inured to the stench because it was all around them, emanating from everyone.

We smoked in class. We smoked at the movies. We smoked at the supermarket. We smoked at sporting events. My friend Jeff, who grew up in Boston, tells a good story about going to Celtics games as a kid and having to look past the hovering cloud of smoke between the cheap seats and the court. We smoked in restaurants, where the smoking and non-smoking sections were often divided by nothing more than a paper sign denoting the territorial boundary. We smoked on planes, man.

It wasn’t too long after college that the world began to shift. In 2003 New York City banned smoking in bars. And I was visiting at the time. By 2003, I was no longer “a smoker” but I was very much someone who would look for reasons to bum a smoke from someone if the situation arose, and very likely to put myself in situations where it might. But I remember the rage from several friends and from the owners and bartenders of any bar we’d walk into. The ban was going to kill bars all over the city. It was going to kill nightlife. It was going to completely take down the economy. New York, as we know it, would cease to exist. Which of course, it didn’t. Everyone adjusted. They went outside. They eventually started smoking less because it was cold outside. People enjoyed being able to hang out in rooms that weren’t making them sick, and they enjoyed going home not reeking of cigarette smoke. If I could go back in time I’d reassure all those bartenders that it wasn’t the smoking ban they had to worry about. It was the kids who’d stop going out at all because they needed to sit at home and tend to their AI agents.

I selected your question this week because I’ve actually been thinking of the smoking ban lately. We grew up in a time when smoking, or dealing with other smokers was an inevitability. Even if you didn’t smoke, you’d most likely work next to someone who did, or sit down next to someone who did at a restaurant, or at the movies. And even if they weren’t actively smoking, and covering you in second-hand smoke, you’d go home with the stench of smoke all over you. Airing your clothes out was an inevitability. Having to wash the stench out of your hair was an inevitability. Society smoked, so you did too. Whether you wanted to or not. And then it changed. Most cities in America now have smoking bans and rules about how far away you have to be from a public entrance to smoke, which get enforced to various degrees.

The change came in a couple of very interesting ways. One, cigarettes are now hovering between $12 to $14 a pack. (I had to look this up!) They’re also available in less places. (You used to be able to buy cigarettes at the drug store!) Secondly, people just look at you weird if you start smoking now. Like, what the fuck dude, did you just light a cigarette!? Are you from the past? Gross.

Which of course makes me think of some of the things that we have currently accepted as a society, things which we fully know are not healthy for society, that we are currently tolerating. And also thinking there’s no way it will ever change, because we appear to be in an era of “what if everyone modeled themselves off the stupidest people?”

Right now there is someone firing up ChatGPT because it’s cheap. Right now there is someone writing a prompt in Claude because it brings him closer to his co-workers. Right now there is someone walking a co-worker through his agentic workflow, in the same way we attempted to impress one another by blowing smoke rings. Right now there is someone parking a Cybertruck on your street, believing that leaving his divorce where everyone can see it is somehow impressive. We have always been good at ignoring the warnings that came with the pack.

Our parents packed their homes with asbestos. They heated their homes with coal. They packed their Big Macs in styrofoam. Making mistakes will always be cheaper than fixing them. But nothing is more expensive than ignoring them.

Cultural norms are an ever-changing thing. History is the story of what was once desirable becoming unacceptable. Something that used to be an inevitability is no longer inevitable. Something that used to be tolerated is no longer tolerated. Something that was seen as a cultural norm no longer is. Even when those things were backed by entire industries with very strong lobbies, as the tobacco lobby once was. The same fate will someday befall the NRA. The same fate will someday befall AIPAC. The same fate will someday befall the slop lobby.

There was a time we thought if we prohibited people from smoking in bars it would lead to societal collapse. I think it was a good idea. More importantly, it was an idea that worked. It improved not just our personal health but the health of our communities.

The basic strategy of all addictive technologies is very simple. They make you feel extra capable, they addict you, then they make you feel inadequate without them. They start by making you feel cool, and confident. Relax. Put your feet up. Hang with the fellas. Social anxiety? It’s toasted, dog! Let me write that résumé for you. Anniversary card for your wife? I can write that for you. Light one up. It’s a great way to start a relationship. But that initial boost eventually turns to reliance, and suddenly you can’t get out of bed without a hit. You can’t write your kid a love note without firing up a slop engine. And suddenly an entire industry is telling you that you’re not capable of moving through your day without their help. An entire industry gaslighting you, until it becomes easier to just gaslight yourself into believing that you were never truly capable of things you are very much capable of.

I don’t miss smoking. Maybe I did at one point. But eventually the whiff of cigarette smoke went from smelling nostalgic to just smelling bad. Thankfully, knock on wood, I’ve been able to escape years of smoking without any major lasting effects, but trust that I carry every pack I ever smoked with me every time I walk up a flight of stairs. If I’m doing anything strenuous, it’s always my lungs that give up first.

Thankfully, I still have some lung capacity. I enjoy using it. You should too.

🚬

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