Should We All Start Smoking Cigarettes Again?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time. It started sometime after we kidnapped the president of Venezuela but before we watched Alex Pretti get shot and killed by Customs and Border Protection agents. Or maybe it was between their detaining young Liam Ramos in his bunny hat and their releasing that tranche of Epstein files and nothing happening. I definitely felt it a couple of weeks ago as I headed inside a fancy dinner party the same day our president had, via social media, threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t open by 8 p.m. The invitation was for 6:30 p.m.

Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it started. But with each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.

Like many ideas of middling wisdom, this one was fed to me by the algorithm. A woman named Stephanie Wittels Wachs was suddenly on my Instagram scroll, reminiscing, longingly, about smoking in the ’90s. Obviously, she clarified, she wasn’t going to smoke; she was just thinking about it. Because smoking kills you. And if she died, she figured, who would take care of her kids? Very solid point, I thought. Then I remembered: I don’t have any kids.

I certainly remember smoking in the ’90s — it was divine. Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other. Talking and talking while we blew smoke in one another’s faces.

In those early years, I was a student at an artsy Brooklyn high school in Midwood. We were “teens” in chronology only — we worked jobs, we went clubbing, we rode the subway at all hours of the night. And generally, in varying degrees, we smoked. The serious smokers were committed. You’d find them out in the school courtyard no matter the weather. Often, they were the benevolent suppliers to those of us who merely flirted with the idea of being serious smokers. Happy, if you joined them outside “for a smoke,” to trade a stick of nicotine for some interesting gossip you might have heard. Sometimes, we even smoked with our teachers. Usually, they were from the English department.

The irony of my current jonesing for a cigarette is that I was, in those days, a dabbler at best. Mainly seduced by the smell of a clove cigarette, usually found in the hands of somebody from Park Slope. But I loved the culture of the whole thing: the intimacy of someone getting close to light you up. The matches, the Zippos. The way, over the course of five minutes, small talk could fall into something like deep conversation.

There was a reason I never crossed the Rubicon into “big smoker” territory though, one I’ve been contemplating a lot in the wake of my craving: I had big dreams then. I yearned deeply to get out of Brooklyn. To get into some kind of a college and become some sort of interesting adult. It was all very vague. But the future was the thing I was really invested in. And I knew enough to know that required focus. And discipline. And that commitment to “being a smoker” seemed to take up a lot of time. All those trips outside. All those minutes, burning into ash, that I felt I probably should be spending doing something that might help with my undefined tomorrow.

In my 20s, the smoking got sexy. Dive bars and chic lounges, where we’d now have cocktails and ash into ashtrays and steal matchbooks with which to help one another light future cigarettes. Since nobody seemed to care that smoking was bad for us, our paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided he needed to care for us. Public indoor smoking was banned, and, inadvertently, we were armed with a new way to flirt. There was nothing better than breaking off from a crowd of friends with an invitation outside to share a cigarette. I realize now the excitement wasn’t in the cigarette. It was in the  possibility that it raised. Would this be a brief excursion to the sidewalk? Or might it end the next morning, in a bed you didn’t really know, sharing smoke-tinged kisses?

Smoking, in this phase of life, went hand in hand with chaos. The kind that is welcome when you are trying to create from your young adult existence something like a life. Every potential mistake was also a potential opportunity. Because maybe you woke up and never saw the person next to you again. Or maybe you fell in love and married them and ended up having kids and getting a few promotions at work and being a big success.

Either way, since I was just a casual smoker, I hardly noticed that one by one, everyone decided that the mayor was right. Smoking was, obviously, very bad for you. We had jobs we needed to turn into careers. Futures ahead of us that we needed to be optimally prepared for. We no longer had chaos; we had lives. Cleanses became cool; the in-crowd suddenly put a premium on personal purification. Cigarettes became signifiers of calamity, the perfect pairing with a broken iPhone screen. Our bodies weren’t just temples, we seemed to realize. They were functioning machines that could run like well-oiled engines. We had many decades to look forward to! And that required discipline and order: eating well and exercising and sleeping more and drinking less. And, quite obviously, not smoking.

By my mid-30s, who could believe anybody ever used to stand outside in the cold like that? What were we thinking? I’d often wonder. We now had better things to do with our time. And our hands. Like work. And check our phones. And go to spin classes and get brunch and check our phones. Or unwind from a long week of work with a yoga class. And then check our phones. Or pull out our laptop and do some work. And then check our phones. Or get together with the friends we barely got to see and then sit around and take out our phones.

Because we were not just working. We were working toward something. Charging toward a tomorrow when every girl could also be a boss if she worked hard enough. The narrow space found between working or mindlessly wandering the internet researching diets that would maximize our lifespans or shopping for serums and masks to make us look rejuvenated and vital. Preparing ourselves for the promised land of success. Readying ourselves to be perpetually “booked and busy.”

Recently, a friend my age was visiting me. She was helping me shop for clothes for my upcoming book tour. Rushing from one appointment to the next, when she suddenly stopped and pulled out a cigarette. “Do you mind?” she asked. Of course I didn’t. Instead, I salivated. Dying to ask for one, but remaining a good girl. Committed to my health. Committed to my future!

“When did you start smoking again?” I asked as I wrapped my arm in hers. We walked and talked, and she told me of a trip to Italy and questioning, at almost 50, how much damage a few cigarettes a week could really do to her. Her kids were basically teenagers; how much longer did she really need to stay perfectly healthy for? She meant this nihilistically and practically. We got to our next destination and just stood together while she finished her ciggy. It felt utterly luxurious. Slowing down and taking the time to take a drag.

So, yeah, part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past. Not in an effort to recapture my youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life. I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives, slowly and insidiously, and worn us down and numbed us in the name of productivity. But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion. Is it really any worse for us than the numbing digital go-go-go it feels we’ve all been engaged in?

And, truth be told, unlike in my high-school days, I’m no longer certain that the future I’ve been preserving myself for is all that promising. Sure, I can eat as clean as I want, but does it matter when there are forever chemicals in the soil? If we’re walking into dinner parties wondering if the third course will include nuclear war, is there really a point in sacrificing a quick thrill in the now?

Which is, perhaps, the biggest part of it all. If smoking loves chaos, then perhaps it is the perfect new-old bad habit for our moment. A moment that is surely being ruled by Eris, the goddess of chaos, upsetter of norms and apple carts. She is meant to be a foil for the western need to find order in everything. She insists that the only truth is chaos. Our lives may have all been in perfect order, but does it matter if the world in which we live in is burning out of control? And if it doesn’t matter, then, I suppose, why not just smoke?

I’ve yet to break down and buy a pack of cigarettes. There is no metaphorical “courtyard” I can wander into and grub a single smoke in, so I’d have to really commit to the bit. But around me, suddenly, smoking is everywhere again. When I bring it up with acquaintances, I am often met with confessions. Secret smokers. But if things keep going as they are — and there’s little evidence that they won’t — I suspect they’ll be coming out of the shadows soon enough. Eager to talk about how crazy everything in the world is while they offer one another a light.