A question for smokers: what social pros and cons do you get from your illness? (shame, pride, feeling like an outcast or a member of an "elite club")

If we omit aspects of physical addiction itself, which makes smoking pleasant and health suffers, and move on exclusively to social and psychological ones:

1. Smoking helps to structure time. I do not know of any other sufficiently well-established patterns of behavior in society that would allow you to regularly get up from your workplace, go to the street, switch your head, hold small talk with colleagues, read a piece of a book on your phone, or gossip in your head on a regular basis. working problem. There are other options, but they are not so common.

2. Small talk in the smoking room is a separate bonus. This is a regular and very simple way of informal communication with colleagues / fellow students on work and personal topics, including those with whom at other times you have little or no intersection. A smoking-room brings more intimate acquaintances than a corporate party, and requires less time than any corporate KVN. Conversations on business issues are often easier than at a specially organized meeting.
   At the same time you can listen to other people's conversations on acute topics and collect gossip. I and my smoking colleagues do this when we go to the customer or try for a new job - we go to the smoking room and listen to who is complaining about what. The result is a very informative picture.

3. Among smokers, there are many people I personally like.
   I am probably attracted to people with a strong tendency to introversion, poor contact with their own body, but a strong emotional life and high intelligence (there are probably other factors that I do not see). Usually they start smoking in order to somehow join a social group, because of the aesthetic appeal of the process and trying to defeat neurotic manifestations, and then they do not quit for a long time, since the fashion for healthy lifestyle and all sorts of triggers "now I am an adult, you need to monitor your health" or "I'm a girl, I must smell delicious" they are rather repelled from this idea.

Cons :

1. People with caffeine, sugar, food, alcohol, adrenaline, love and many other addictions, throwing into their body no one knows what, killing their body in all other ways, orthorexics, neurotics - all of them still consider themselves better than you and consider it possible to teach you.

2. In general, it is not known what people, in transport, for example, or mothers, who are terribly unhappy with you, the smell of your clothes, your presence at the edge of their child's field of vision, or suspect that you are personally going to mess up.
   Neighbors, who believe that if there is a smell of smoke on the stairs, then it is you who smoked (from the creators "if you have a dog, she shit on the flowerbed" and "if you have a child, then it was he who scattered syringes in the entrance"). And, of course, crazy aunts who rush at you shouting "smoking women giving birth to freaks" and street pickup masters with "smoking is harmful." I would also like to note that I came across this endless stigma only in the CIS. For some reason in Hebope with her tougher fight against smoking, no one has ever thrown at me and no comments if I follow the rules of smoking in public places, did not let go.

3. For the vast majority of non-smokers, you are categorically unattractive as a sexual partner. Sometimes it's a bonus though. You light a cigarette and immediately good fellows fall off from you, in communication with whom you are not at all interested.

I have been smoking for two years, but once or three a day. just as calmly I can not smoke, it does not matter for me.

From time to time, I think that a cigarette is great, cool. Well, you must admit that old bitch ladies look very elegant with a tobacco product in their hands, especially if in films, TV shows, books or photographs. they look graceful when their fingers are so beautifully spread out and smoke comes out of their neat mouth.

but, in addition to all this beauty, there are significant disadvantages: 1. you smell of this creepy chemistry

2. not many people like it

3. it affects your health

but I don't see any reason to quit, because the disadvantages are not significant for me, and I can not smoke for some time, if necessary, I can)