Looking around a pub garden while with some friends this summer, I realised something had changed. For the first time in a long while, more of us were smoking than not. Clouds coiled up from the faces of people I had mentally filed away as having given up, fag-ends were being crushed into ashtrays by fingers I no longer associated with a bag of Golden Virginia and fiddling with filters. When did this happen?
I am a smoker. I am aware of all the many reasons that I should not be. You know these reasons as well, so I’ll get through them quickly: it causes the most preventable deaths every year, it’s expensive, it makes your clothes smell, your teeth yellow, damages nearly every organ in the body, is especially idiotic during a pandemic of a respiratory illness, is bad for people around you. The list goes on, and on.
And so when I started smoking again in earnest, earlier this year, I felt stupid. But I also felt like I wasn’t alone. Cigarette sales rose in 2020 for the first time in twenty years. It makes sense. There was so little else to do, so few activities to wring some pleasure from. But although sales have dipped in 2022, they are still up on pre-pandemic levels, particularly among young people.
I’ll say it again: obviously, smoking is bad, by more or less any metric you care to apply to it. So why are so many of my friends, who quit in their late twenties, at it again? Outside pubs and in crowded smoking areas I keep hearing people say “smoking is back”, but it’s the tone they say it in that’s interesting. It’s celebratory, but in a satirical, jaded kind of way. What is it about this moment in time that has prompted people to light up again?
Picking up smoking properly, by which I mean smoking every day, throughout the day, happened for me because I needed a way to deal with one of those all-timer, hall-of-fame bad break-ups, and all of the associated upheaval. During all the worst times in my life, cigarettes have been something like a spiritual practice, or an evil string of rosary beads: something to touch, to measure out a day on in a secular kind of prayer for relief.
But it seems that for me, smoking is something I can pick up or put down with relative ease. I quit smoking for almost two years at one stage without thinking too much about it, because I moved to a country, Sweden, where people didn’t smoke as much and it was bastard cold much of the year. I am not in the same league as the father of someone I know, who was a classic 40-a-day desk-smoking journalist, and who eventually quit by having a friend drive him to a cabin in the remote Scottish highlands and leave him there for two weeks with a crate of whiskey and no means to get anywhere to buy cigarettes.
For a lot of people, smoking is a stress response. I asked a friend of mine, who also took up smoking as a response to a break-up, why he feels like cigarettes offered him relief. “It’s a self-anonymising ritual, which obviously you want more of when you’re sad,” he said. For him, and for many people who roll their own cigarettes, it’s also the calming effect of having something to do with your hands.
I smoke straights because roll-ups make me light-headed, which is only semi-affordable because I buy them in airports when I have to travel for work. I take a grim sort of satisfaction in having to go into those sordid little antechambers they keep the cigarettes in at duty-free areas, full of rotting teeth and grey-looking children and difficult-to-identify body parts. The even more sordid smoking rooms in European airports, populated by drab travellers with ugly backpacks.
Reaching for cigarettes when things are bad is something people only do if they are accustomed to the pleasures of smoking, which is why health policy campaigners are sensibly emphasising anti-smoking measures that target the young before they ever start. New Zealand has just introduced a new law that will increase the legal age to buy cigarettes year on year.
But for those of us who smoked a bit, and are now fully fledged smokers again or for the first time in the last few years, I think it is part of a larger trend that somebody at a party once described to me as “luxury fatalism”. Luxury fatalism is the feeling that everything is garbage, and that there is no real recourse to change that fact, so we should all just go all in on whatever it is that we enjoy about life. A sort of “I deserve it” feeling about everything. When people are stressed out or unhappy they revert to easy, comforting behaviours. We all saw it in our own ways during the lockdowns: whether it was internet shopping, unhealthy eating or drinking too much. But it has outlasted the pandemic and now constitutes something more long-term and less forgivable than “treat brain”. A New York Times article about the rise of smoking published earlier this year posited that this nihilistic attitude is reflected in the resurgence of indie-sleaze, the replacement of the “clean-girl” aesthetic with “goblin mode” and the notion of being “feral”, which I think has something to it. If the much-vaunted “vibe shift” has a more precise definition, it’s luxury fatalism.
The break-neck acceleration of vaping in the past year or so is, I think, part of the same line of thinking. Elf Bars appeared so suddenly this summer it felt as though Santa had left them at the foot of people’s beds. E-cigarettes, once the reserve of chronic yoyo-quitters and odd men, are now everywhere you look. Every corner shop sells Elf Bars and their many imitators, a rainbow of fruit-flavoured dummies for adults that don’t remind me so much of cigarettes as they do of Chupa Chupps. I feel infantilised when I use one, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like that. It's the “I’m-baby”-fication of smoking.
And it’s probably too early to say whether people will graduate from vapes to cigarettes, but it is a long-standing truism that the two products form a snake chasing its own tail for people addicted to nicotine: starting to vape to quit smoking, starting to smoke again to get off the vapes. My housemate, who has never smoked a cigarette in his life, is devoted to his Cherry Cola Elf Bars. I am huffing on an Elf Bar right now, something it is unfortunately very easy to do in a totally unthinking way. I caught myself the other morning on the way to the shower thinking, “perhaps I will take my vape with me”. At least with cigarettes you need to find a lighter and go outside.
It is beyond obvious that Elf Bars are unjustifiable from a climate perspective. They’re single-use plastic objects that serve no purpose. And yet, here people are, huffing away, wilfully doing something we know to be bad because it’s seductive to feel like there is no point resisting the downward slope the world seems to be on.
I wonder if we should be taking any of this lying down. Apathy is a self-indulgent position. It’s the last thing we need to be cultivating, but its pull is strong when all around us things seem to be getting worse and worse. Various crises becoming part of the furniture of life: the climate, the economy, mental health, you name it. But there’s nothing laudable about just giving in to behaviours you know to be detrimental because it’s easy.
I tell myself that I love smoking. At the risk of sounding like Will Self, I tell myself that I love the way smoking is time-keeping, punctuation in speech, a miniature meditation, a break from a social situation, or conversely a “tiny campfire”, as my friend Sam put it recently, around which people gather. That I love the many meanings of a cigarette: a stress ball, a celebratory pat on the back, a midnight treat, a consolation prize, a fashion accessory.
But if I think about this for more than a few seconds it’s clear that this is romanticised bullshit. The idea of smoking is cool, however much health campaigners and your mother would like it to be otherwise. People look cool smoking in movies, on Instagram, on street corners. And smoking a cigarette in certain kinds of aesthetically pleasing situations hits that mark for me. But the actual act of smoking a cigarette is often sort of degrading. Trudging to the 24-hour supermarket in the early hours of the morning, smoking in the rain, the smell of it in your hair, that needy moment of parting where you have to admit that there is no more cigarette left, singing your nose hair on a lighter, burning holes in your coat, rubbing flakes of ash into your clothes with a thumbnail, emptying an overflowing ashtray, spending your money on frying your lungs. Taking the glamour out of cigarettes has been a relatively successful endeavour: removing the contexts in which it is pleasant to smoke: after dinner in a restaurant, in a pub, with a well-designed packet of the things sat on the table in front of you. Because so much of the pleasure of a cigarette is actually enjoyment of the situation you’re smoking it in. The cigarette itself doesn’t bring you pleasure at all.
This is one of the central theses in Easy Way to Stop Smoking, the cult quitting book by Alan Carr (the other one). Because of how fast nicotine is absorbed by the body, Carr argues, smokers are in a near-constant state of withdrawal. What is happening when I smoke a cigarette is not pleasure, it’s merely relief from a problem the cigarettes themselves have caused.
I will quit, as everybody should. It’s a draft New Year’s resolution of mine. Apart from anything else, thinking about the cost of cigarettes in the face of everything else being so expensive at the moment makes me feel ill. But I fear that the “return” of smoking is the symptom of a larger malaise that is, long-term, perhaps more damaging than a few cigarettes.
