A Smoking Myth

“Of course it’s cool to smoke!”

“Why else do you think we do it?”

“Because it tastes good?!”

To be fair, I was revved up, talking to a pair of kids about my embogglement that millennials have picked up the cigarette again. Here I was, thinking that my generation saw the death-throes of the myth of the ‘cool smoker’, and then fifteen years later its right back with a vengeance.

What I entered into, believing it was an abstract conversation, turned personal when I realise that the old goat across the table was an avid smoker.

And in the same fairness, I think that we need to take a closer look at the smoking “cool” factor under a microscope if that’s, with any seriousness, supposed to be an argument in favour of an addictive, filthy, toxic habit which for the previous decade has been relegated to a proclivity of the uneducated.

Celebrities, ray-ban’d camels, white-shirted James Dean look-a-like motherfuckers, the sensuous lips of some fake Audrey Hepburn craddling a phallic roll of paper between her lips, and the virile frontiersman in a wide-brim hat and fluttering longcoat; smoking ads have peddled hard the vision of the cool smoker. The independent, the confident, the rebellious, the determined; essentially The Strong. Not dissimilar from a cancerous cod-piece, swinging into battle like someone stuffed a banana down their britches before going to war in some medieval conquest.

And to be fair – an erect penis leading your way into armed conflict might just be one notch more lethal than slowly killing yourself by turning your lungs to papier-mâché.

But here’s the thing tho… Smoking cigarettes does not make you strong – in fact quite the opposite! There’s nothing about the sexually decisive or ruggedly independent inherent to huffing a cancerously spiked upper ten times per day. Your virility is actively decreased from smokin’ ’em, with your general health crumbling slowly over the course of decades, equating the habit to slow suicide. And that isn’t even getting into the mechanics of what makes people not just develop the habit, but what which makes them take one out of their pockets…

Whenever I hear a person saying they “need a smoke”, it is used as a coping mechanism. From stress, fright, tension, whatever have you. Surely as much out of comfortable habit as any medicinal reason. It’s essentially used as a coping mechanism. Combine that with the myth; the myth of the strong resilient frontiersman or the sexually charged femme fatale, gazing at your through a haze of smoke seeping out their mouth. Odds are that these myths are as addicted to smoking as the general population. Which means that they are, right at the moment of the memorialization of the myth, having a smoke to cope with something. Stress, nervousness, fear, or excitement. The myths are essentially self-medicating right in front of you while at the same time selling you the image of strength and independence, self-reliance and determination.

So why are people smoking? That’s essentially what the old man asked me, although beit rhetorically. Well – my answer is simple, and not just for his benefit. Because they’re being told to. The tobacco industry spent 8.2 billion USD in 2021 on ads (in America) meant to convince people to smoke. Meanwhile, in 2024, the National Cancer Institute received 7.22 billion USD in funding. More money is being spent to convince you to smoke than is spent on trying to cure the prime complication of smoking cigarettes: Cancer. You are a smoker because billions of dollars have put puppet strings on you – first by making you believe the myth of the cool smoker, and then once you’ve had your drag, to make you irresistibly dependent upon the thing.

The only difference between cigarettes and heroin is that cigarettes have a better PR department.

No one likes to be told that they’ve built their image on a lie. That they’ve been tricked. It so very often leads to the person turning that lie into a core part of their identity – like encapsulating the shame with a cyst of pride. Whatever it takes to escape the guilt, they instead burrow deeper into the myth they’ve been sold. “Of course smoking is cool. Why else would we do it?” To me, the answer seems self evident. You’re doing it because you were tricked. Because you were fooled and lured into a chemical dependence that pollutes you. You’re doing it because you were young, dumb, impressionable, and you made a mistake.

Everyone can be fooled. Everyone does get fooled. No one’s safe from it, and it’s okay. Everyone’s gullible until they learn not to be. That alone doesn’t make you an idiot.

Perpetuating the myth while you’re coughing your corroded lungs out, and getting pissy and dismissive when someone questions your delusions? Yeah – that’s a different story though…

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/5-2024