The cotton candy-buffet of society. Entertainment on our one-dimensional, flat-screen, wall-mounted televisions that give us endless choices, read our algorithmically trained minds, and feed us limitless but unfulfilling content, we might miss the one thing that is, well, missing: cigarettes.
In 1965, 42% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes <a href="https://pressroom.cancer.org/2025-tobacco-atlas">compared</a> to 11% in 2023. Never has something so prevalent in the culture fallen so far out of favor.
Are we better for it?
Sure, if we let our lungs dictate public health policy, then bravo cig scolds. You’ve done your job. But from a broader societal view — one where we examine tradeoffs and trends, aesthetics and habits, life’s joys versus the firm hammer of the lifestyle police — it’s a tossup. But there is no doubt that something has been lost.
Post-WWII America was ready to settle down and light up.
There was a barrage of consumerism-fueled advertisements, the flash-bang of novelty housewares and houses — Plastic! Nylon! Asbestos! Vinyl! The Joneses lived next door, where the grass was mowed on Saturday morning, and the backyard barbecue was fired up at night. There was a trip to Disneyland, kids with coonskin hats, and Roy Roger cap guns with matching cowboy boots. Mom had a Kelvinator Foodarama refrigerator, Dad brought a briefcase and hat to work, and there was a Cadillac Eldorado in shimmering Brenton Blue parked in the driveway. A new RCA television sat on the satin-carpeted living rooms of Suburbia U.S.A., where Groucho Marx bet your life, the White Hat always got his man, Eliot Ness appeared, cigarettes were everywhere, and life was good.
Too good to last.
The hippies took care of that. And a misunderstood war. And assassinations and civil unrest, and a nation at the cusp of generational change. It was also the release of a new superpower, the combining of government as your mommy and daddy, combined with the limitless self-important smug narcissist-morality complex of virtue-by-action. The ultimate shame game; a nuclear bomb dropped on society that didn’t defer to natural selection — it was selection. Big Tobacco was the villain, and moral scolds looked down their noses at the dirty, working-class cigarette smokers from their jazzercise class and Jane Fonda workouts, dressed in Nike sneakers and spandex, sucking fresh-squeezed pulpous juices from the exotic carrot section of a natural foods co-op, extracted from a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, and pecking at bran flake cereal. Pedal faster on your stationary bike.
Thus was born the true nanny state. We shifted from Robert Young&#8217;s Father Knows Best, to the feds and the little foot soldiers of the social justice army, doing their best to boot stomp as life’s-simple-little-pleasures police.
Fast-forward past the release of the landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warning of the health hazards of smoking to today. The rate of tobacco use in the United States has fallen significantly and keeps falling, now to its lowest point in the U.S. In 2024, only 9.9% American adults <a href="https://biologyinsights.com/how-many-people-smoke-in-the-us-key-statistics/">reported</a> smoking at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and currently smoke every day or some days (the CDC’s definition of a smoker). Public health became public business, singled out and stigmatized. But decades of being squeezed into zones, taxed, ostracized into frozen huddled masses behind the dumpsters in the dead of winter, and subject to rude comments from passers-by — all in the name of “public health” or as the grannies say, “For your own good.”
For your own good. What does that mean? How far are we willing to go? How much are we willing to moralize our neighbors to soothe a sense of do-gooder attitude toward complete strangers?
Now Gen Z — the kids who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop over Covid mass hysterics, had the environmental neuroses of the world heaped on their backs, and are drowning in the inherited miasma of youth sculpting, health-maxxing, green-drink, bio-hack, and Silicon Valley godsplainers — are on a steady diet of kombucha and anxiety (and, it turns out, vaping, which doesn’t count because it’s gay).
We have access to eye-popping amounts of personal data, we have health trackers, bio-cryo-genesis, cell rejuvenation, fillers, plumpers, GLP-1s, and personal trainers. Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, The Biggest Loser, Gold’s Gym, L.A. Fitness, Planet Fitness, Equinox, Washington, D.C. Sports Club, New York Sports Club, and Pure Barre. Spinning, plyometrics, resistance training, martial arts, therapy art, AI therapists, personal dietitians, life coaches, meditation coaches, sleep coaches, sleep trackers, and mind-body spiritualists.
We’ve had fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free, high protein, high fiber, low-carb, no-carb, natural flavor, no flavor, non-GMO, organic, fair-trade, small-farm, farm-to-table, vegetable-forward, cage-free, free-range, grass-fed, raw, steamed, canned, flash-frozen, dehydrated, rehydrated, sustainable, oil-based, natural color, no seed oil, no artificial color, no color. Filtered water, ultra-filtered water, mineral water, distilled water, reverse-osmosis water. Bottled water, water bottles, canned water, and lugging around jugs of water.
Eggs are good, bad, and good again. Same with coffee, alcohol, fat, bacon, steak, fruit, fruit juice, soda pop, ice cream, caffeine, sugar, milk, sunlight, sunscreen, anti-perspirant, underwear, processed fibers, processed foods, ultra-processed foods, preservatives, vitamins, supplements, and MSG. Now there are PFAS, PVB, PVA, UVAs, and UVBs.
Yet we are constantly told we are the unhealthiest beings on the planet. What good does it do?
Eh, not a whole lot, except to encourage people to obsess over things that, a generation or two ago, we didn’t even know existed. We had more common sense and common experiences. We went to bars and smoked cigarettes and met girls and had drinks. It wasn’t a five-alarm fire waiting for Karen to write in the comment section about how bad smoking is. Guess what? We know. It’s right there on the pack of Luckies, Marlboros, American Spirit, Camels, and Newports. It’s been drummed into us since grade school.
But after years of “guidance” from the government on everything from vaccines, masking, heart health, weight, junk food, seatbelts, exercise, sleep, eating, and drinking, along with social pressures from the same mentality of people who wiped down their groceries during COVID, who believe non-electric vehicles should be banned and that firearms spontaneously leap up and shoot people, and who think it&#8217;s their right to moralize habits, vices, and pleasures for a sense of self-importance and righteousness, it’s time to knock it off.
Cigarettes come with an attitude. What that says about the smoker is up to the smoker, but right at this moment, it’s a small act of rebellion against the nanny state and the health-and-wellness scolds. The truth is, we’re not really well. A person can follow all the right rules (or at least the rules of the current minute) and die a tragic, untimely, and unfortunate death. Another person can break all the rules and live to 104.
The rise in the prevalence of smoking, or at least its visibility, was a recent Vulture <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/should-we-start-smoking-cigarettes-again.html?_gl=1*o4rqa0*FPAU*MTQxMzg4OTc3MC4xNzgwMzY4NTU2*_ga*MzYxNDg5NjE5LjE3ODAzNjg1NTU.*_ga_DNE38RK1HX*czE3ODAzODE2ODckbzIkZzEkdDE3ODAzODE2OTckajUwJGwwJGgxNDQ0NDcxMjk5*_fplc*WnhoWTdqTDg5dHZ4SGxaQW5LM291aVk0dUppUnZDSFdBWiUyQk1uVEZrcXU2OHNIS0w2cWE2cnBseWJ5dTJYSnVVZ2QzTHUwaFV4eldhc0UxZWFvUmhlM0lEYW8xdjhleG1qZXppekJ6N1ZuOVVVQjdXV2JGdm9XeDIxWWY4NWclM0QlM0Q.">essay</a> in New York Magazine by writer Xochitl Gonzalez. She discusses why smoking is attractive, “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.” (Even though she acknowledges the risks and dangers of cigarette smoking, there are still comments accusing her of shilling for Big Tobacco and warning of the health consequences, completely missing the point of the piece.)
Are there other ways to accomplish this? Sure. But for some people, it’s enchanting: A tactile experience that evokes the simplicity and freedom of the past; a rebellion against the health obsession and neurotic worrying of our present.
It’s the aesthetic of the movie-house big screen, where people used to laugh and cry together. It’s the wild west, the punk rocker, the Monte Carlo gambler, the race car driver, the farmer, the guys at the track, and the ladies at the bar. It’s in the hands of athletes, musicians, artists, movie stars, inventors, presidents, soldiers, and writers.
If you look through the smoke screen, you might find something in that slim smoldering stick. You’ll find what you’re looking for, whether it’s unyielding confidence of Clint Eastwood’s Blondie in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with his silent, piercing eyes; the toughness of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in his Casablanca-white tuxedo coat, a taut, complex face of a man deep in thought over the hill of beans he’s found himself in as the Free World hangs in the balance, a cigarette lingering in each scene as if it were an extension of his hand.
Audrey Hepburn’s delicate, gloved hand with a comically long cigarette holder perched between fingers that seem like they could wave away the worries of the world, as only Holly Golightly could, draped with simple elegance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And then there’s the sex — and lots of it. Sharon Stone is notoriously dripping with sex as if she found a natural wellspring and bathed in it for Basic Instinct. Lighting a cigarette in that famous scene, as a room full of bulging-eyed men look on, objecting to her casual flicking of the lighter just to see what she would do. She lit the cigarette.
Smoking is the thousand-colored beam of light that radiates from a single prism; an act of defiance and rebellion, comfort, power, greed, lust, love, connection, grief, loneliness, confidence, satisfaction, sex, and contemplation.
Film director David Lynch was a visionary and a creative in the purest sense, never succumbing to the indignities of conformity or to a world that restricted the possibilities evoked by great art. He was also a smoker. In an interview with <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/david-lynch-music-sound-chrystabell-cellophane-memories">Sight and Sound</a>, he described the relationship between his art and cigarettes, “Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.”
The split screen of the American psyche runs through the moving images that form our collective consciousness. Nothing is more prevalent as we shuffle through the Baby Boom generation, with their privilege of living in a sheltered shadow of post-WWII America: the land of space dreams and cosmic urgency, shaken up with the rising passions and fears of the escalating Cold War; hot rods and surfers and rebels, with or without a cause; rock and roll dancing to The Stroll, duck walking with Chuck Berry, and hips shaking with a king; Gunsmoke and the Duke; the Rat Pack and Vegas. The mid-20th century evokes the images that shape our present, especially popular culture. Maybe we’re longing for something that we lost, and in smoking, we see a glimpse of that past and are addicted to the feeling that we could get it back, even if it’s only for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
Lynch cited the contradictions of life in his work and his art, observations indicative of his genius. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”
***

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You Should Never Take Up Smoking. Unless You Want To Look Really Cool

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Evening Wire: Lebanon Ceasefire Begins & Murder-Suicide Rocks VA | 4.16.26

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You Should Never Take Up Smoking. Unless You Want To Look Really Cool