Illustration by Briana Rengifo; Source images: Getty ImagesSave this storySave this story
I do everything a reasonable person is supposed to do.
I meditate. I do breathwork. I show up at my weekly therapy appointments, even when I would rather sleep in. I take the SSRIs that my therapist, my former primary care physician, and I all agree I should take. I work out several days a week. I go for a walk every evening before dinner. And, despite applying for hundreds of jobs, I’ve been out of work for a year. The stress of being without a stable income and benefits has affected my well-being on a cellular level, and the protocols that are supposed to work do not—even though, by every measure of wellness culture, I am taking my own care seriously. Before I left DC to move in with friends in North Carolina, I spent every day on edge, wondering when someone would unlock the door and force me and my possessions out onto the curb.
I do everything a reasonable person is supposed to do. And now, for the first time in a decade, I want a cigarette. To get even more specific, I would kill for a Marlboro 27.
For the first time in a decade, I want a cigarette.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US. While the long-term health effects of the occasional cig are tricky to track, we do know smoking even just one causes immediate damage to the body, and, of course, you run the risk of developing a really nasty habit. Despite this, they are having a cultural resurgence, and many writers have spent the last few months parsing out why. In The Cut, Xochitl Gonzalez made a melancholy case for smoking as a rebellion against the productivity-poisoned way we live now, a way of stepping outside our optimized matrix and engaging with another person for the length of a cigarette. In Allure, Gabriella Onessimo followed the smoking aesthetic into the makeup aisle, rightly clocking that the beauty industry is glamorizing a deadly addiction.
At my peak, I smoked half a pack on a mild day, though most were bad ones where I would have nearly the whole 20. When I quit, the effects were immediately noticeable. Within weeks, my skin was better, my resting heart rate was going down, and I could take deeper breaths. Quitting was one of the few unambiguously good decisions I have ever made about my own health, and I do not regret it. Still, the desire to smoke pops up. Most likely because addiction, even one I had a long time ago, has rewired the neural pathways in my brain a bit, but there’s also the intense stress I find myself under.
A class story lurks beneath this current wave of cigarette nostalgia, too. Why do Americans deal with stress by grabbing a $10 pack of cancer sticks from their local corner store? Even though fewer people are lighting up, smoking rates historically tick upward during and after catastrophes—as they did in 2020, after 9/11, and following Hurricane Katrina, when a percentage of former smokers relapsed, and current smokers started burning through more cigarettes. Even when calamities are more intimate, such as being unemployed for a long period of time, there is a higher risk of smoking, likely due to anxiety.
Stability remains among the best treatments for stress, but our current job market makes such a simple ask seem improbable. Fewer people are optimistic about finding work than they were during the pandemic—I’m one of them—and, last May, more than half of US workers said that job insecurity significantly affects their stress levels. It doesn’t help that the safety net is being actively dismantled. Health care is inaccessible to many. Significant cuts and restrictions to SNAP, TANF, and Medicaid will plunge more people further into poverty, a consequence of policy choices that are not focused on human well-being.
Stability remains among the best treatments for stress, but our current job market makes such a simple ask seem improbable.
So, the answer to why people smoke to cope with stress is straightforward: Cigarettes cost about $10.
Seconds after taking a pull, you’ll feel the calming effects of nicotine, and your stress will decrease for a moment. You will get that reprieve you are desperately craving. Your relief will mimic that photo of Ben Affleck, standing out front of a nondescript building, mouth agape, cigarette in hand, eyes closed, finally catching a break. There is no other intervention available to a stressed person that is that reliable, and the cigarette does not require you to work or volunteer to qualify for public assistance.
Or, at least, that’s the conclusion I came to once I caved and had one. I popped into a 7/11 on my block and bought some 27s. I stood on my balcony with the pack in my hands for a few minutes because I’ve written extensively about what I was about to do and decided to roll the dice anyway.
It was euphoric.
My eyes rolled back in my head, and I took a deep breath to get the smoke farther into my lungs. I held the fumes and the irony of taking a deep breath of cigarette smoke, something I’m only able to do because I quit in 2016, for a few seconds before blowing it out and going back in for another pull. My shoulders dropped, and I felt serene. In 10 seconds, the cigarette did what 12 months of intense wellness-ing hadn’t. Then, about halfway through it, I realized I was risking putting myself into a horrible cycle of addiction and put it out. After I woke up—the hit relaxed me so much I knocked out—I spent a few hours feeling guilty about it. But I’ve done everything a reasonable person is supposed to do.
In this economy, it simply wasn’t enough.
