Why smoking is good for you

In contrast to many of my peers, I didn’t get any present when I turned 18 and never smoked. Many of my friends secretly smoked since being 14 and took the present anyway. My parents had a wholly different strategy. My mother simply said she would break our legs if she caught us smoking. I didn’t take this threat too seriously but I never smoked anyway because I was too nerdy to pull it off. But lately I’ve been thinking, what if there’s more to smoking than looking cool?

What if smoking is a way of regaining control over your life? Let’s say you’ve just worked 8 hours in some lousy office or service job for a crappy salary, how do you deal with that? How can your ego deal with being screwed every workday from 9 to 5? One way is to construct some fantasies that restore some of your self-worth (see my other post); sure you’re getting screwed, but one day you’ll quit and the office will fall apart because you’re the only one that knows how things work, and they’ll be so sorry for treating you like shit! A different way is to screw yourself harder than they can by smoking a cigarette. The cigarette externalizes, makes tangible, the abstract violence that is done to you by workplace exploitation (among other things) into the little ‘cancer-stick’ that is the cigarette. In this way it could be similar to punching a wall when you’re angry, or even self-mutilation.

But which part of yourself are you punching when you smoke? In my view, each human is split into two parts. One part knows the painful Truth of its existence; the fact that you are basically an insignificant cog in the machine, lacking any meaning or dignity. The other part is precisely the fantasies and the lies we tell ourselves to deal with this horrible truth. Since a direct confrontation with this Truth is impossible, the only way to assert it is through a ritual like smoking. When we smoke we act out, we willingly stage the violence that the world inflicts on us, thereby creating a distance towards it.

Such an ‘acting out’ of our misery is the only way to really confront it, and to do something about it. Still, there is a big gap between confronting and changing, as evidenced by the people who are stuck smoking two packs a day.

The Humiliation of Work

Imagine a farm with ten workers on it. To sustain themselves, each worker has to work 5 days per week. Now let’s say that through mechanical inventions, the efficiency of the farm has so increased that only two workers have to work on the farm to produce the same amount of sustenance. What would the workers do? Would they divide the amount of work amongst themselves, so that each would have to work only one day per week? Or would two workers do all the work and keep all of the food, while the other eight have to beg for scraps?

Although the former would make more sense to me, the latter is what’s being practiced all over the world today. Each worker’s effort should be appreciated, but instead he is considered to be lucky when he succeeds in finding work in the first place. Why? Are we in some sort of permanent crisis of production, such that everyone who doesn’t work deserves to starve? Or if this is not the case, why can’t we support the people whose work has been made superfluous by the very success of our production methods?

The answer is of course, because the wealth that our production creates flows not back into society, but into the accumulation of capital. This capital is then used to improve even more upon the production process, making it a vicious cycle. Workers are held hostage; if you refuse any command the bosses make, there are hundreds more workers outside waiting to take your place. This is where the true humiliation begins.

Not only do you have to work making money for someone else, you have to be thankful for the chance to do so. Not only do you have to be thankful to do so, you have to pretend to enjoy it, to convince your superiors that you are the right person for the job. Not only do you have to pretend to enjoy it, but you have to make sacrifices for it; working unpaid overtime to prove how dedicated you are to the success of your employer.

To protect themselves from this humiliation, some workers convince themselves that they really are dedicated, and that their sacrifices are appreciated, and that without them, the workplace would fall apart. This bubble is burst when they are replaced with a worker, maybe an intern, maybe an Indian, who will do their jobs for 2 cents less.