Once upon a time you could smoke everywhere. Hell, high schools had smoking lounges. Everybody smoked. I actually remain a bit puzzled about why people start smoking these days. I’m not being judgmental, I’m just genuinely curious. When being a smoker involves always having to find a moment to duck out of wherever you are to light up outside, it just doesn’t seem that fun anymore.
People who are genuinely curious first conduct an online search or two before publishing stupid and meaningless posts. There are addictions that are a lot more inconvenient than smoking, yet people still practice them. Sometimes, inconvenience is precisely what makes an addiction attractive.
The reasons why people get addicted to smoking (and as we all know, out of those who start, many never become addicted. There are people who smoke for years and are not addicted and there are people who smoke once and acquire a strong addiction immediately) are as follows:
– oral stage traumas (which also make for generally addictive personalities);
– a need for identity formation (“a cigarette is a small white axis around which I gather the pieces of my identity every time I smoke,” one smoker told me);
– a compensatory mechanism.
Of course, when all three come together, you get an addiction that is very hard to break.
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