I do not mean to make this personal. I don't even mean to generalise the stupidity to outside the initial decision to partake in smoking in the first place. When you refer to a safety blanket and whatnot, these are all things that smoking became for you after you had already begun, and therefore you cannot be blamed for deciding to smoke now, as there is in fact a benefit.
Now we are getting somewhere.
I already felt on a regular basis, in such emotional pain, that I would have to keep punching myself, in the leg and in the head, until my leg or head hurt so bad, that they hurt more than the emotional pain I was feeling, on a regular basis. I already saw that smokers showed a sense of itchiness before they had a cigarette, and a sense of calm and relaxation when they had a cigarette. I had an extreme itchiness, due to my emotional state. I decided to see if it could reduce my state of emotional pain. It did. The health costs were heavy. But the emotional turmoil was ripping my physical and emotional state apart. It was really not much different than choosing to give someone chemo, which is a heavy poison, to cure cancer, except that it was for a chronic condition, that would not go away like cancer would. It was still a rational choice, even before I started.
My peeve (or whatever) is this: there is a feeling when you talk to smokers that they are the salt of the earth, they don't care what you think and if you don't like then it's your problem.
Never heard anyone say that about rich, wealthy, snobby, smokers.
Are you sure that you are not thinking of poor working-class people, who already think of themselves as 'the salt of the Earth'? It's true that poor working-class people didn't care what others think of them drinking and smoking. Their lives were pretty awful anyway. Smoking and drinking was just a way of getting through the day, without getting so fed up with such a difficult life, that you went postal. The health risks were bad. But the horror of their lives was far worse.
As Jarvis Cocker sang in "Common People":
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.
http://www.elyrics.net/read/p/pulp-lyrics/common-people-lyrics.html
Ever been that guy at the party who coughs their lungs up after one bong? That's what it feels like.
Been that guy, even as a 20-a-day smoker. Everyone said "We were all like that in the beginning. Just have another go." But when I politely said "No, thanks. I'll skip it.", and stuck to my guns, people moved on, and later on, even admitted that they admired me for it.
When you refuse a smoke they act like you're naive, like you saying no is the action of someone who does not understand the value of smoking. Of course then they might pay lip service to the 'I wish I didn't start' gods, but there is always some sort of social disadvantage. I come from a family of smokers, I used to think smoking was something that all adults took upon coming of age. I am the only one in my family (and the majority of my extended family, which is huge) who does not smoke tobacco.
You have an entirely different problem, one that I can relate to, because my family had a similar reaction when I went through a phase of being more religious than they were. They had the same reaction.
They were struggling through life. They knew that smoking was bad for them. But they felt they needed it, and really couldn't see any other way of dealing with their anxieties.
In their eyes, you were just like them, one of the family. But you didn't need to smoke. You didn't suffer with their anxieties. You didn't even seem to struggle with it. So all they could see, was that you were just like them, but somehow, you could do what they could not.
It left them feeling like they were in some way disabled, inadequate human beings. They NEEDED to see that you smoked, or that you only didn't smoke because of some problem you had, that they didn't, or it would have brought them into feelings of inferiority, which would have raised their levels of anxiety to a level that even smoking could not help them with, and could have brought them to feel they were unable to function at all.
When I try and think of a reason why someone would take up smoking, I can come up with the following:
a) - they desire to fit in.
b) - they started before they knew the implications.
c) - they were passively addicted either though some other habit, or through accidental exposure.
d) - they are stupid.
Peer pressure is often under-played, because most humans feel the need to belong. Speaking from experience, feeling like you don't fit anywhere can be absolutely horrible. It really wrecks your self-esteem.
We humans are built with a survival instinct and a reproductive urge. In the modern day, this translates into working at a job for money with which to live, and a desire to have sex, form a relationship, and have a family. But we learn mostly from imitation of others. So we are mostly unable to see how any of our needs can be fulfilled, except by looking at what others do.
So, if you look around, and see others that mostly seem like you, and they have a job, money, a place of their own, friends, a social life, and a girlfriend, then you want to be like them, because by being like them, you are adopting the same lifestyle patterns that got them all those things, and so, you are likely to have all those things as well.
If smoking is a part of that, then smoking is a part of that. If they all smoke, then it seems to be an integral part of their lifestyle patten, and without it, there is a very good chance that you simply will not be able to achieve the foundations that give them, and you, all the things that you so desperately need.
The stupid smokers, if such a categorisation can be made, are the one's who made the deliberate decision to begin smoking knowing the consequences full well and who still claim to not care what people think, or at least to have not cared at the time they were addicted.
Do you fit into any of these categories? if not, could you help me improve my model?
INTP's are a perfect sample because they generally don't care too much what people think (or at least have little desire to conform), and generally think through their actions more than the average.
As I wrote, I fall almost perfectly into your 'stupid smoker' category. I have rarely been called stupid, only by people who assumed that I did things without thinking. When I did explain my reasons to them, which took 2 hours or more, suddenly realised that I had very, very good reasons for what I did, and then they realised that I wasn't being stupid at all.
The question that you need to ask, is why any peer groups started smoking in the first place?
Smoking hurts everyone's lungs the first few times. It also has a noxious smell to non-smokers. Everyone begins life as a non-smoker. So everyone begins life by finding smoking smelly and unpleasant.
Sure, someone had to try it first, just to see what it was like. But still, at that point, everyone else would have not liked it, because of the smell, and he would have not liked it, because it would have hurt.
So there had to be a big pay-off, one that was sufficient to make it worthwhile for a whole group to begin smoking.
Also, as you get older, the smoke accumulates in your lungs. You cannot run as fast. Your breathing starts to hurt. You find that you feel pain in your lungs very often. Of course, those who have started, are addicted, and those who have not started, have not experienced this. But old people almost always tell you all about their every complaint, and not everyone smokes. So it would have quickly become apparent, that continued smoking would have caused you much difficulty. So centuries before doctors found out about the harm of smoking, smoking should have died off.
So that pay-off, has to be something, that is fulfilling a need, a need that is not fulfilled by any other source.
There is another reason. I once watched Oliver James, a noted British psychologist, say on British TV, that nicotine is the strongest anti-depressant around.
We also know that throughout the last 1,000 years of history, that people in Western countries had the most appalling life. In the Middle Ages, people's life expectancy was somewhere in the late 30s. In France, just before the French Revolution, life expectancy was somewhere in the late 20s. However, it was much, much higher, decades higher, thousands of years before that, in the Stone Age,
Over the centuries, life had become much, much harder, and much, much more stressful. Pre-Revolutionary Paris was full of noxious fumes. The dye factories of pre-Revolutionary France produced the worst by far. A scientist tried to measure the air pollution at the time. He sent an assistant of his, who wasn't used to the pollution, into the worst areas, where the dye factories were. The guy was only in there for 15 minutes. But he barely made it out alive. He was in serious condition. Any longer, and he could have been dead. Smoking was not going to make much more of a difference.
But smoking did have one strong effect: the anti-depressive effect of nicotine, made people feel a whole lot better about their pain, both physical and emotional.
So it became very popular in areas where there were a lot of working-class people, especially people who were exposed to noxious fumes for much of the day, and who needed something to relax them, and who wouldn't really feel that much worse from smoking, because their lungs were damaged already from the noxious fumes. Rich people didn't want polluting factories near them. But the factories were making goods to sell, and transport was by horse, and very slow, compared to today. So the factories had to be close to the cities. So they tended to be put in cities, but where rich people didn't live. So they tended to be put in poor areas.
Among rich areas, people still would smoke. But there was not much stress in their life. So it was used as a sign of wealth. In rich areas, it didn't matter if you did smoke. It mattered that you were wealthy enough to always have cigarettes on hand, and that you could afford a gold cigarette case. When rich people would go out, they would take out their gold or silver cigarette case, take one, and then offer others, as if to show they were being hospitable, when what they were really doing, was showing off. Then, they would take one or two drags from their cigarette, and then stub it out, or they would take a drag, leave it in the ashtray, and then leave it there, while they chatted. They never chain-smoked, or smoked it right to the butt, as poor people did. When rich people would run out of cigarettes in the middle of the night, they would never go hunting for butts, like real nicotine-addicts do, which I've seen people do, on plenty of occasions. They would just do something else.
This was all because rich people were never nicotine-addicts. It was an affectation, to have an excuse to show off their wealth, much like most of what rich people did.
That is why the anti-social messages about smoking worked so well. The rich quit, because they were never addicted. They only smoked, because it was a tool for ostentation. Once smoking became anti-social, having 20 cigarettes on hand, in a gold cigarette case, just meant that you were being 20 times as anti-social, and gilding your anti-socialness to boot. So you weren't improving your social status anymore, by smoking. You were decreasing your social status, by having cigarettes in your house.
So, it wasn't enough for rich people to quit. They had to be seen to be of higher social status, which meant that they had nothing to do with smoking whatsoever. They had to become anti-smokers, criticising smokers, and putting themselves on a pedestal, for being oh-so-good and oh-so-clever, for stopping smoking.
Anti-smoking just replaced smoking as a tool of social climbing and ostentation.
In its place, came things like expensive gyms, personal trainers, organic food, macrobiotic diets, bottled water, pro-biotic yoghurts, and anything else that claimed that you were more successful than other people, because you were living a healthier life.
Working-class areas still have the same correlations. Those areas in which people were still heavily working-class, and felt the same oppression and toughness in their lives that they'd always felt, still were heavy smokers.
Those areas which used to be working-class, but had now converted to middle-class, now had a class of people who had far less stress, and had serious aspirations to be rich, and so emulated them, becoming ardent anti-smokers.
Those who used to find that for them, it was socially unacceptable to smoke, and who had low socioeconomic status, like women, and who now found that they were given greater socioeconomic status, started using cigarettes for the same reasons that the rich used to, only they used it to show off how wealthy they had recently become. So suddenly, as women started getting a lot better jobs and earning a lot more money in the 80s, smoking in women suddenly rose. At the time, scientists were very surprised. But psychologically, the reason was obvious. It was a very easy way for women to say "I used to be poor, and could afford very few cigarettes. Now I have a lot more money, and can hand them out like water. Observe my greater status in society, and acknowledge it."
In other countries, a similar phenomenon occured. Countries that were experiencing a swift economic rise, from extreme poverty into previous Western levels of wealth, started seeing a rise in smoking, again amongst those who were moving up the socioeconomic ladder, except that in those countries, it was men who were moving up, or men and women, and smoking rose with their socioeconomic status.
The vast majority were never addicts. An addict is someone who, when they run out, can barely stand to be without for a few hours, before having to go out and do whatever it takes to get their fix, and until they do, nothing is going to stand in their way. Anyone who is a proper addict, could never board a non-smoking plane, without going to the loo and having a crafty fag. Today, they get caught. You show me someone who never boards a plane, never gets a job that requires them to not smoke for several hours, cannot go anywhere where they are unable to smoke for a few hours, and today, that will seriously curtail their life, and you are looking at an addict. The rest were just doing it to show they were better than everyone else, or just to fit in, and never got addicted, and find quitting not that much of a struggle.
