Ciggies

I’m writing a book about being peaceful in the digital age. A determining question I encourage readers to ask themselves to the digital hooks in our pockets is “does this connect me deeper with my life, or distract and take me away from it?” The truth is that all of us are learning, in the most real-time experiment ever conducted on human-guinea-pigs-slash-market-participants, that we now simply have to live with the addictive pull of the digital’s novelty.

So I thought it would be fun to write about the time I was addicted to cigarettes and what this intense (and mercifully short) episode taught me about addiction and connection.

I smoked a cigarrette in 2007, when I was seventeen and working in a restaurant. It tasted like a cigarette, which is to say like dank earthy tobacco and chemicals, a cocktail no one would would voluntarily imbibe if the nicotine wasn’t so supremely satisfying. Still, it took me a few sucks accompanied by post-shift drink to get a little hooked. By the time I absconded to Europe for a gap year trip in 2009, durries were a delicious apperitif with alcohol. I came back a few months later pairing my morning cup of black instant coffee with tobacco. That last sentence was hard to type.

And actually, part of me misses durries. Oscar Wilde priggishly said cigarettes were the best kind of pleasure because one couldn’t get enough of them. I think he meant the repeated sense of satsifying a craving, the desire returning reliably within hours to hound me into durrying again. That’s the way addictions work; promising an end to desire, delivering said promised end, and creeping back on you. Repeatedly satisfying yourself throughout the day is lovely, in a way. It’s a momentary pleasure enjoyed many times, and I looked forward to my post-shift durry every afternoon. I keep myself on this karmic cycle to this day, addicting myself to caffeine around the same time as nicotine, bounding out of bed each day looking forward to my daily hit, edging myself until my nerves start to stretch by waiting a couple hours before that first sip. I’m enjoying my morning cuppa right now and getting giddy just writing about it.

There is no more instructive experience than addiction. You learn against your will, that your addiction, and more importantly your life, has no arrival, no terminal you eventually pull into and finally rest from the demands of life. I could have died blissfully halfway through each one of my Dunhill Blues. I never did though, so was instead forced to live long enough to see the satisfaction wane into ambivalence, melancholy, before rounding the corner again into a familiar, dawning urge. You learn, much to your dismay, that your behavior is under the control of an external substance, that your will is really a puny thing in the face of the hungry ghost, the compulsive turnkey that is your mind turned into a monster. You start seeing the cogs bending in one inevitable direction, and you’re powerless to stop it. The gates of hell are locked from the inside.

Nicotine is particularly egregious. The urge to smoke felt like a finger entering the back of my brain to tickle my spine, making my nerves jitter and dance. It would grow in intensity, the image of a cigarette (gross!) pulsating in the mind to let me know the unbearable, wound-up energy would dissipate, the mounting dopaminurgic anticipation dissolve with a click, the burn, an inhale. Once I worked a fourteen-hour shift straight, without a smoko. It’s impossible to keep a cool head for that long. My temperament was held hostage with a gun to my own head, until I could suck back some nicotine. Oscar Wilde was right; I still remember that cigarette, taken out the back of the restaurant alone in a wintery Hobart night, half of it inhaled in one go as my knees turned to jelly and my mind soared in ecstasy.

This is not me! It just looks exactly like me.

I wisely quit at the age of 23, as Wilde’s endless satsifaction turned to the realisation I was smoking because I had to. It shaped my behaviour, planning in advance to make sure I had access to tobacco; invaded my thoughts while doing other things; caused me to brood over my compulsion; despair over how long it would be before I would quit. Smoking began to bend my reality around it, narrowed the range of things that bought me pleasure and happiness, organised me around its requirements for consumption. My aperture on life closed. There was me - the helpless organism dancing to nicotine’s tune - and the substance, playing me like a puppet.

Sadly, the payoff for pulling my phone out is nowhere near as awesome as a true substance disorder. It’s a mediocre hit, justified only by its social acceptance and accessibility. No one - not even during an important meeting - seems to care if you casually start scrolling mid conversation. Watching the execs on Mad Men punching dart after dart in the office, I started feeling nauseus before realising executives now just compulsively pull their phones out to check notifications. I’ve seen it. Surely this will be a future point of satire as we realise how dumb it was to addict ourselves again.

Then again, we’re all trying to disconnect ourselves from something. Yes, even you - that little murmur of disquiet rippling across your consciousness is trying to tell you something, so you quiet it, maybe with a ciggie, maybe with your phone, perhaps something else. The only thing I can say with certainty is that peace comes by first choosing to listen to it.