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Something that has changed since "my time": Almost nobody smokes anymore

civilized redneck@beelzebubba (77)25d

When I was a teenager and even before that, it seemed like smoking was something that the cool kids did and there was also pressure that comes along with high school to do so as well. I started smoking in high school and it is a wonder that I ever made it past the first ciggy. I remember it to this day. I got woozy after the first puff, really started feeling sick, and I can still remember the drinking fountain just inside the school where I was trying to make the dizzy feeling go away and then went into the boys room to throw up. It is truly a monument of youthful idiocy that I ever had the 2nd cigarette. I did though, and I ended up being a smoker for about the next 10 years.

It's a crazy habit that stuff, huh?

Anyway, It's not like I am stalking kids or anything like that but I do notice them out and about in my day and a few of my friends have teenage kids. I almost never see any of them smoking and it is not like they are hiding, they just don't want to do it.

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That picture is from the 70's, a decade that I wasn't alive for most of, but in the 80's and 90's it was still very widespread. at my high school it was technically forbidden for us to smoke but the teachers knew we were doing it. This was so widespread in the parking lots and certain areas just outside of the school that the teachers and administrators didn't even bother to bust us for the most part. They weren't dummies, we weren't puling anything, they just knew the futility of getting us in trouble for it.

Through a variety of factors though, smoking seems to have "fallen out of fashion" among teens and I guess that is a good thing.

Many would point to the rising cost of tobacco due to taxes and what not but North Carolina, where I live, is a tobacco state. A lot of the economy of this state is based on tobacco and therefore we have some of the cheapest cigs in all of USA. So that is not the factor, it has to be something else.

A friend of mine's teenage daughter told me that man kids vape, but not really a lot of them. She couldn't think of any of her friends that did that and she, as far as I can tell, is a reasonably popular kid.

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Now this is going to relate a bit to the last post I made about every new generation thinking that their one was smarter and better but I'm going to take a knee here and admit that this is where the new generation has us beat. Due to shifts in just the way that teens think I guess, smoking is not cool anymore. As silly as it sounds, it was very cool when I was in high school. Basically if you wanted to take part in a lot of the "cool kids" stuff you needed to be a smoker. These days, the opposite is the case.

I'm sure the teens today do plenty of stupid shit, but forming a potentially lifelong addiction into a habit that is almost certainly going to give you bad health problems isn't one of them. For that I am grateful. As far as I know there wasn't any sort of mass brainwashing campaign against smoking either. Maybe the powers that be realized from D.A.R.E. and "just say no" programs of the 80's and 90's that these campaigns are often very counterproductive and create a "forbidden fruit" sort of situation.

I have my judgement about the youth of today and have a very difficult time identifying with anything that they enjoy doing, just like every single generation that has come before. I gotta hand it to the kids today though, their self-elimination of smoking for the most part is very admirable. Now if we could just get them to stop trying to turn every imaginable!situation into a TikTok moment.

Comments · 3

  • @jacobtothe(77)· 25d

    I was home-schooled, so peer pressure wasn't a factor, but I still never felt like taking up the habit. I saw no appeal. My parents didn't smoke, so that example probably helped. One grandmother was a regular smoker, and there is an odd twinge of nostalgia when I catch a whiff of smoke that matches whatever brand she preferred, but on the whole, I still hate secondhand smoke. When I attended college, there were crowds of smokers outside the doors of every campus building. They were eventually required to leave a perimeter of clear space, but at the time, it was running the gauntlet every time one entered or exited. Then, I had a stressful call center job for a while, and smoking was heavy there, but I never joined in there either. Not bragging about being vice-free, just not that one.

  • @cryptoandcoffee(85)· 25d

    I think if you did not smoke and ended up in the army then you would be smoking because everyone smoked there. Today many vape which I have heard is just as bad so I would say less are smoking but it is still happening, just differently. When I worked for a tobacco company years ago females smokers out numbered males two to one.

  • @darth-azrael(74)· 25d

    I graduated high school in 1993 and even then, there werent that many students that smoked, at least where I lived. It seemed like a pretty quick transition from the late 80s to the early 90s. My parents smoked and i could never stand it so i was never really tempted. It seemed like almost any 1980s movie and earlier had everybody smoking.