Cigarettes have always been a writer’s best friend. It’s the perfect excuse for a five-minute break when you’re working on a big project, but it seems that smoking has made it out of the writer’s sphere and turned, in an unexpected 360 (Charli reference), the health core of millennial culture.
During the height of millennials, we got Disney adults, yes (quaking in my Versace go-go boots), but we also got health nuts. I couldn’t give you a single name because, quite frankly, they all look the same to me: the women are skinny and toned in their Lululemons as they stroll out of their morning pilates class to get a matcha; and the men just look like Joe Rogen sometimes with hair.
This was a very traumatizing time for me because I don’t believe in group exercising, because I am that much of a misanthrope, and I’m also of the belief that raving for 8 hours with a vape clutched in my hand is a sport, which is not compatible with the whole healthy lifestyle.
But now things have changed, Britney Spears had security called on her for lighting up a cigarette in her private plane, Charli XCX, Gabriette, and Jeremy Allen White are all massive smokers. Hell, we even have an influencer who smokes cigarettes for a living (I love you, Jacob Jones, may you remain unproblematic).
It seems that the pendulum is swinging on the opposite side of healthy, now waking up with a redbull in hand, a cigarette in the other, with three hours of sleep ringing in your ears, is the new cool, and I’m not against it.
But why this switch from one generation to the next?
Well, we don’t have much to live for, do we? What’s the point of dieting and living until you’re 90 when all you’re gonna see is a boiling earth with slimming natural resources?
Nah, thanks, I’d rather die at 60 with my smoking habit and coke (the drink) habit and see the world as a shitty place but living until 2090 sounds fucking unbearable. Not that 2025 is doing much to restore any hopes. And I know I’m not the only one who thinks this, or else you’d have quit smoking by now.
Personally, I just want to live until Suzanne Collins dies so I know there won’t be any new Hunger Games books left to read because that woman keeps creeping out of her shell every five years to drop a bomb on the cultural world, then disappears, and I need the final word in that series.
On another note, France is slowly banning smoking from public spaces; you can no longer smoke in parks, on the beach, and so on. In the meantime, they’re also rising prices for tobacco; a pack of cigarettes is now 12.50 euros, which is just ridiculous when you can drive three hours to Spain or Italy and have it at 5.50.
I started smoking at 16 when I got into college and stopped around 3 years ago. For the past couple years, I had a crazed matcha phase, yoga and sound bath sessions, 5 minute meditations in the morning to which I took the liberty of internally cursing everyone who pissed me off in guise of well, meditating and intricate meal plans and calorie counting that probably birthed several eating disorders. Now, I’m back to smoking and I can’t write without a damn cigarette
Sometimes I notice that no one sits down quietly to smoke anymore, talking about things that interest us. They just smoke out of anxiety instead of habit (tudum tss 🥁).