Smoking: Delight vs. Destruction

Is smoking a cigarette a philosopher's moment of repose? An addict's moment of helplessness? A sad moment of slavery?

Without any habit involved, the first option is possible. The problem is that most people who smoke have a habit, an addiction. Therefore they do it for reasons that have to do with a chemical dependency, and not much to do with pleasure, relaxing, or the good life. While smoking regularly is surely bad for your health, it is similar to alcohol in that a little bit won't really hurt you, it's the addiction that's the problem.

I am one of the lucky ones: I have smoked a little bit - maybe an average of once every two months, for most of my adult life. I really don't understand what the physical addiction feels like. And most of the people in my immediate family who smoked when they were younger were able to quit relatively easily.

But recently a few people close to me have been in the process of quitting, and so I'm curious about it. Oftentimes people who quit successfully says they had a philosophical mind change that helped them get through it -

• my cousin says she convinced herself cigarettes give her cancer, and the revulsion to that idea helped her quit 
• An African-American friend told me he realized that addiction to a substance is similar to slavery, a means of oppression and helplessness, and the revulsion to that idea helped him quit
• An old teacher of mine said once he smoked a whole pack in a day and got so sick that he became convinced cigarettes were poison....and the revulsion to poison helped him quit

Then I happened to listen to this Freakonomics podcast that goes into some of the large scale studies - these were my two biggest takeaways -

• Many people smoke in order to medicate themselves - often unbeknownst to them - as a result if anxiety, depression, blood sugar issues - but then of course this "medicine" hurts you far worse than the ailment. So in this case it takes some work to figure out what you're medicating and how to treat it differently. 
• If you are experiencing a dependency on something, you need to divorce the thing from any notion of pleasure in order to break it. I have this problem with food, which I often use as a reward system. In order to control my diet, I often use rewards of time off, seeing a show, or getting a massage, rather than saying "I deserve a nice dinner."

I often notice that smokers equate a smoke break with "a step outside" - a relaxing break in the sunshine. It might be interesting to test how to take that pleasure out of it. It might be as simple as having a rule that you can't talk to anyone while you smoke. Or to keep the pleasure and cut the smoking out: you can sit in the sun or take a break, but not with a cigarette in your hand.

There are so many ways to quit an addiction like smoking, the more testing a person can do, the better. Which is also true of dieting I think. Both take time and dedication, and accepting there is no silver bullet solution.

pretty little lung cilia, dancing in the breeze

All that said, I'm personally trying to follow the commandment of "my body is my temple" with being as healthy as possible while enjoying life to the fullest. Some people have all sorts of addictions in their lives, and still make the world a better place, while their bodies function well enough to do so. The definition of a problem is when it gets in the way of something you want. Not because somebody else says it's a problem.

We must each decide how to live the fullest life, finding our own combination of decadence and discipline.

Sometimes that means, quite simply:

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

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P.S. My dad once met Ayn Rand, a writer he idolized, in the back of a limousine while escorting her from the airport to Harvard to speak, where he was a business student. He was so nervous he didn't know what to say. She smoked the entire way. Finally he blurted, "If you're so rational, why do you smoke? She looked at him and said, "The doctors say quitting won't do me any good, it will kill me regardless." She lived to be 77.