Smoking

[Belacqua]

It seems that people here don't see the aesthetic appeal of smoking because they can't separate it from the health impacts.  That's totally valid, of course.  I don't smoke anything except the occasional cigar, and haven't returned to smoking cigarettes, because of the health issues.

Perhaps a more interesting question to ask would be: if smoking was entirely health neutral, would it seem cool and aesthetically pleasing then, or would it remain the same?

To me, I think the aesthetic quality derives partly from the smoke itself, partly from the media portrayals of smokers (esp in older movies), partly from the ritualised elements that surround it, partly from its social rebelliousness and death-drive factor, and mostly from the way it provides ways of having subtle non-verbal communication within discourse and increases the silent pauses in conversation.  In the right hands, smoking then becomes a social and conversational tool.

I can't think of anything that replaces smoking in those aspects - chewing gum, for example, doesn't have the same social uses or aesthetic quality, imho.

I'd like to find a healthy alternative.

I was in art school way back before smoking became socially unacceptable. It was definitely a significant part of conversations. The way the teacher would light up when he settled down to talk, and inhale while he's listening, and wave the cigarette around for emphasis. It was all a little dance that we did that had meaning. Stamping the butt out on the floor of the classroom was making a point. Obviously it was less of a thing in lecture classes, but one-on-one it was ritualistic. 

No doubt a lot of this came from media examples. This was still back when the hard-drinking death-defying genius was a thing people believed in. The ideal was to be a New York expressionist or a Parisian intellectual. Those images were cool to us. 

But as you say, the "social rebelliousness and death-drive factor" has always been important. 

Maybe you've heard of Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew, but moved to America and became the first great ad man. One of his greatest coups was to associate smoking with women's liberation. He paid prominent libbers to smoke in public, and got people calling cigarettes "freedom torches." Before that it was low-class for women to smoke, but he enlarged the market hugely by creating the image that smoking=liberation.

And I think this image is still probably the main factor in why people smoke -- in fact the more the normies scold smoking, the more it will be attractive to some people. The people who pass judgement and scold maybe don't realize how unpleasant they sound. Shaking their fingers and saying "get that stuff away from me." I'd rather be a smoker than someone who goes around wrinkling up his nose at everything he disapproves of. 

"Live fast die young" used to be considered a possible choice. As atheists, we normally believe that there is no transcendental rule saying that a long healthy life is the only acceptable choice.