Why I smoke
Because yes, liberty does mean the freedom to harm oneself
Smoking cigarettes will kill you. There is a mountain of scientific evidence proving such. Smoking will degrade your body into developing lung cancer and increase the risk of heart disease. But I still smoke. I spend upwards of $40 a week on cigarettes, money that could go towards “better” luxuries or my future. But I still smoke.
What I am not trying to do here is convince others to smoke or make a case for why my smoking is actually righteous. Perhaps you will find my argument better suited if you read it as a stream of consciousness rather than an argumentative essay to why as an individual I decide to smoke.
Smoking is the purest form of protest to all exigence that demand your adherence. It is purely unpopular and inherently anti-performative. I have been called out many of times when smoking to stop, that it is disgusting, and disrupting the public’s well being. As I am forced to toil with other young men in this world created by our parents and grandparents they do not allow us even the simplest of pleasures they enjoyed in their lifetime. They did not have to stuff themselves in apartments with strangers to make ends meet, they burned their fortunes and passed on that burden to their sons. They did not have to risk life and limb to get their hands on alcohol before they were twenty one years of age. They had the luxury of that being legal. So I will reject their protests. I will choose to continue to smoke. There is no bright twenty first century for me to prepare for by quitting smoking. There is no reason for me not to work in the short term; the pleasure I gain from this cigarette I will feel better now than the lifetime I will have saved myself for to continue to sacrifice my labor for a society that hates me.
Smoking is egalitarian. In a more sensible world, men and women of all stripes smoked cigarettes. Washington big wigs in glass hotels enjoyed a pack of Camel lights. The Virginian coal miner enjoyed his Marlboro Reds. Indian middle managers enjoyed a pack of Lucky Strikes in his off time. Chinese steel workers smoked their Chunghwa.
I feel that it is only just I smoke. I am in league with a tradition of generations of men and women that have bonded over a historical epoch longer than any of us will live to understand fully. To smoke is to be a modern man, a worldly man. It is to yearn for a time where history is understood. To yearn for a practice beyond strict technocracy—demanding that I live for as long as possible to extract the most labor and meaning out of my behavior—to reproduce and continue the cycle for the rest of my memory’s life. It is to fulfill the internationalist mission of our forefathers. The American man smokes, and so does the free world. His friends in Japan, the free people of Europe and the Anglo world smoke with him. They relish in the freedom to smoke, like they do in a freedom to drink alcohol or bad food.
And that is the soul of my protest. The advent of anti-smoking campaigns has been the canary in the coal mine for the nanny state and boomer technocracy. The protestors of anti-smoking campaigns have been entirely vindicated in their lost war against overbearing government. It started with the ban in restaurants, initially voluntary, but even property owners do not have say. It continued to flavored products. It moved to extending the purchase age to 21 in most of the Union. The privileges I once had were stripped from me by merit of being born later. My liberty taken away in the name of public health. I have lost my agency in deciding to consume a flavored tobacco product, a liberty that the Lawmakers had in their hands when they were in my period of life. It seems stupid. To protest taking away of deadly products so I cannot kill myself. But it is a matter of principle. The liberty to do with my body what I please. It will soon be alcohol. It will soon be sugary drinks and caffeinated beverages. The eternal nanny of the state will execute its will against you to decide what is best for you. You will be as healthy as you can be to conduct the labor and efficiency of the total State.
The humble cigarette is like speaking with a old relative. It’s calming, reminding, a mix of hope and despair. Hope that you can one day reach their achievement. When smoking, I feel a sense that maybe just in a tiny way my protest will tick back the clock on authoritarianism and towards a more Liberal, free society. One where the activity I decide is not judged by its economic or social merit via government channels, but by my own free will and free association with others. It’s a reminder that the clock is actively ticking the other way. The energies of my forefathers have been eroded by a hubris dictating that the majoritarianism of democratic government or the desire of a cabal of social and political elites truly is a better agent in supersizing their will over me than I am. As the wheels of Tyranny continue to chug their ways down the tracks of history I am forced to hitch the ride. But I will choose not to do so as a blind agent of control. So I will continue to smoke. I will continue to waste the $40 a week. I will continue to worsen my health. I will continue to toil in the generational suffering that is smoking. I will toil with those downtrodden men who have gifted the free society that I inhabit today. And I will stay loyal to that mission until the state decapitates the hissing snake that is obnoxiously puffing a cigarette in a cold alley on my 15.
IBID