“Smoking is an older friend than almost anybody I know.”
May 13, 2015 1:42 PM   Subscribe

Being Towards Death is a short documentary by Whit Missildine / The Permatemp Corporation consisting of short interviews with smokers about their habit. Permatemp also produces This Is Actually Happening, a podcast of freeform interviews with individuals who have had interesting, strange, and sad experiences.
posted by Going To Maine (21 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I just quit a few months ago and I was trying to figure out why I feel a little... empty. I feel objectively better: I have a lot more lung capacity, I can smell again, and I don't stink like a bar floor. But still, I miss the ritual and the community and the taste after a good meal or a beer.

I also realized smoking was my only constant for 15 years.
posted by lattiboy at 2:08 PM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


There is an elephant in the room in the discourse of smoking: everybody dies of something. Smoking doesn't make you die, life does. Smoking usually causes certain known modes of dying, but that doesn't really change the fact. If anything, as I've said many times before, a horror of smoking is not that it makes you die faster, but that most of the time it makes you die slower.

I felt like the unheard questions created a negative framing, or that there is an inexorable internalized negativity through which all talk about smoking must be filtered, but if I'm going to try to find out about peoples' habits, I want to know why they do do it more than what they do it in spite of. The bits about the danger of bricks falling or crossing the street were opportunities to delve deeper into what they're saying, but left alone it was kind of a "eh, whaddya gonna do? might as well smoke." It was kind of a counterpoint to, "Coffee and Cigarettes."

I thought the older, fit guy should have gotten more words in, because that's kind of the golden boy syndrome I empathize with: what if you haven't just given up and have other habits that might counteract the damage? Framed another way, how do smokers survive in this day and age? From the sounds of it, many are beaten down.
posted by rhizome at 2:39 PM on May 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


Nice piece. I quit some time ago and still watching others smoke can fill me with longing. I really identified with the man who said he smoked because he liked it, and because it reminded him of his youth. That's a big thing for a lot of smokers...you start when you're young and healthy, and smoking feels like less of an imminent threat when you still sort of believe you'll live forever. The reason people keep doing it is because they're addicted to it, plain and simple. The nicotine becomes a fixture in a smoker's dopamine pathways, which is why it is SO FUCKING HARD to quit. Even a few unintended nicotine-free hours used to feel so ghastly that I put off quitting as long as I could. And ultimately I couldn't quite get it up to quit just for myself and my health, it was my beloved's loud and persistent aversion to the habit that really prompted me to stop. I definitely breathe easier/smell better/feel healthier since I quit, but I can't shake the idea that I'll never again feel as much satisfaction, as much bone-deep relief as I used to get from lighting up a cigarette.
posted by little mouth at 2:51 PM on May 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


No. Never again. My little P.S.A.: Allen Carr. If someone wants to revise that link so Metafilter gets referral, that's cool.

Not a shill for it. Just an advocate. Smoking cessation has an industry unto itself; this book is not part of that industry.
posted by yesster at 3:26 PM on May 13, 2015


yesster: Amazon links are automatically reconfigured, by pb's wizardry, to give MetaFilter credit.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:23 PM on May 13, 2015


Smoking was a long time habit/addiction for me, and something was really missing when I quit. I was lucky to spend time with someone dying of lung cancer a year after they retired, without that I would still be smoking for sure.
posted by snofoam at 4:25 PM on May 13, 2015


Smoking doesn't make you die, life does.

My father was a smoker. He quite about 35 years ago. So far he has outlasted his father by 10 years (my grandfather died at 65).

My father-in-law was a smoker. He never quit. He died of colon cancer about 15 years ago. He was barely 60.

Fifteen years is a long time. My father has been able to watch my two sons grow up. My father has also been able to provide my mother with companionship.

So yeah we all gotta die, but there are reasons for sticking around.
posted by Nevin at 5:54 PM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


This Is Actually Happening is pretty awesome. Thank you for this link. This is what I have been looking for. I like their ethos: Illuminating the human record through film, radio and design, we believe that the best stories have no conclusions, the most interesting people have no answers, and the greatest work of fiction is a true story.
posted by Nevin at 5:56 PM on May 13, 2015


After 45 years smoking, I quit. That was 4 months ago. I'm 59. It got to the point, like the older fellow in the film, where coughing and wheezing started to become normal. Well I'm happy to say that I have not wheezed or coughed after the first of quitting. I can breathe freely again. So many positive things! Still I think about smokes a lot. But I know I just can't do it anymore.

The greatest thing, though, is how much my family (wife and two daughters) appreciate it. They never bugged me about quitting. I just did it on my own. Maybe I'll be around a little longer than if I had not quit.

By the way, my brand over the last 20 years was Long Life! It's a state brand here in Taiwan.
posted by rmmcclay at 6:24 PM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Pffft....claptrap. Yeah, I mean, I sympathize with every thought expressed here. I've thought every thought there is to think about smoking. Smoked for 15ish years, 1.5 packs a day. Yeah, we all die of something. However, I'm happy to die of something without the years of aching lungs, coughing loogies, stinky clothes and hair, and social embarassment that plagued me constantly as a smoker, and weren't getting better. When I awoke in bed at 32 to a metallic pain in the lungs and also an addict's urge to immediately light up, I knew it was now or never. It's not what I want to kill me - it's a lousy way to go. Both my maternal grandparnents were dead before 70 because of smoking. My mom just celebrated a birthday her own mom, my grandma, never made it to. Because she smoked. I think only when you're young can it look that academic. My mom is going to outlive my grandmother, because my mom quit and my grandma didn't. Sure they both face death at some point - but the people who love them get a lot more out of one relationship than the other. Selfishly, I'm thankful for the extra time.

Smoking is psychologically insidious. You end up wrapping it up with everything you find good in your life, as though it is responsible for bringing you that good - as though it is inseperable. The "sense of community," the "relaxation," the pauses, the breathers, the emotional regulation. I mean, I understand. I felt I was giving that up, too, when I first quit. But last year I passed the milestone where, finally, I was a nonsmoker longer than I had been a smoker - and those things seem like illusions now. They seem like what they were, the addicted mind's powerful associations between physical/neurological drug effects and meaningful, lasting life experiences. The good news: you'll find a way to have meaningful interpersonal life experiences and anxiety regulation and calmbreaks and a "sense of community" - in fact a deeper one - when the trigger or the bond is no longer about nicotine. I'm glad I've outlived the era when I and all my peers smoked. Looking back, it looks like what it was: youthful, needy, momentarily hedonistic, out of my control, lost, pathetic.

Basically, quitting was the toughest thing I'd ever done until this past year (when I undertook an enormous and difficult project that I love-hated). It's tough to quit - it's unhappy, scary, a sacrifice, lonely, fearful. At the same time, I'm so glad I did it, and because I got to the other side I can understand that a lot of what we romanticize and lionize and mythologize about being a smoker is a bunch of cultural/sociological/tobacco company crap that you actually can, and do, get beyond - and there's a more authentic life beyond it. I'm sorry there are some people who never muster the courage or have the energy to get there.
posted by Miko at 8:55 PM on May 13, 2015 [7 favorites]


The thing is, it does work, quickly and superlatively, more effectively than basically anything, meditation be damned, to calm, boost attention and concentration, etc. Smokers are dumb, but not that dumb.

I quit for a year and a half once. It was an easy one. I threw Carr, gum, the patch, and burpees at it. I collected images of long-time smokers' faces and teeth; smokers just hanging around, marking time; fouled organs. I think I also had a pic of Britney Spears on an off day in the mix. None of that was going to be me. I was going to return to my natural state of wholeness, and achieve, and make up for having wasted so much. A fortunately timed city ban helped me along. So I found that I could, actually, just let it go. I felt my body's actual capacity for the first time in years. I'd had no idea how poorly I was. All of a sudden, I had more energy than I knew what to do with, breathed better, slept better.

I dreamt of smoking, though. And faced with the hardest Christmas of my life, the feeling I was going to scream myself out of my skin, and a pack of smokes someone had forgotten on a table, I couldn't not give myself that comfort. It's so fast. It works so well. That's the only thing left in it for me, I disgust myself routinely. I don't want emphysema or lung cancer (or even just wrinkles, honestly). I've made ten serious quit attempts since the big one, vaping and all, and I just haven't been able to stop.
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:57 PM on May 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I quit about 2 weeks ago. Smoked for 30+ years. Enough. The "everyone dies" idea is bullshit; of course they do, but not of heart attacks at 50, or tongue cancer. I've been thinking of this clip a lot.

I've been using up the nicotine lozenges left from an older effort to quit, but I am coming around to the school of thought that they are just delaying the inevitable need to suffer complete withdrawal. I'm going for that over the weekend.
posted by thelonius at 4:35 AM on May 14, 2015


The thing is, it does work, quickly and superlatively

Sure. The thing that enabled me to quit was actually recognizing what these positives were that kept me going back to cigarettes - the hidden bonuses, the redeeming yield of the habit. Once I knew what they were I had a fighting chance of finding non-addicted ways to get the same results. It meant more in the way of deep personal change and less of a quick-fix, but it's been worth it, especially since life since then has thrown in a lot of struggles no cigarette is equal to, and those more complex coping skills come in handy.

It's also worth pointing out that smoking kind of causes a lot of the anxiety it pretends to relieve. IT's calming to smoke, when you're a smoker, because every couple of hours your body starts going into withdrawal and crying out for a nicotine infusion. That feels like anxiety and stress to us, but it's mostly addiction. Then you end up associating all anxiety and stress with need for a nicotine fix, which makes that addiction feel permanent. You kind of have to rewire yourself (at least I did) because once you teach your brain how to ride this nicotine cycle, the neural pathways are always there. The brain has to be taught to drive down some new roads, which is uncomfortable for a while.

By the way, Allen Carr's emphatic fatuousness always drove me crazy. I quit with the help of AmericanLung Association's Freedom From Smoking, which is a free online program that takes you through a staged process of quitting with planning, attention, and support. It walked me through predicting tense and tough times, making plans to cope with anxiety in healthier ways, and was there 24/7 with a sympathetic cohort when I needed help. I was ready to quit, but it helped me work through the implications in a way nothing else ever had.

The first three years or so I kept track of my quitting anniversary and counted the days and missed smoking and had to actively resist. These days, it's like a vague and distant memory. Can't believe I ever smoked, and when I think about doing it for a fleeting moment, it's such an idle, bad idea, such a weak vestigial impulse, that -knowing the consequences of taking another drag - there's just no way.
posted by Miko at 5:52 AM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think it's fantastic that you were able to overcome your addiction, and I hope that's a permanent state of affairs.

I'm not unfamiliar with the ways psychological reinforcement interacts with dependence, or the narratives we tell ourselves about it; I've benefitted from smoking cessation programs like the one you did myself, inasmuch as I now understand my particular patterns and payoffs very well. I don't disagree that there's probably room for improvement in my coping methods, and hope that further work there will make a difference for me.

I think, though, that it's also good to remember that there's genetic variance in vulnerability to nicotine dependence. That side of things is just going to weigh more heavily in the equation for some people than others. I haven't been tested or anything, but I think it's a good bet that I lean that way. Also, I mean, genes or not, it's just a really hard thing, the long-term abstinence rates are abysmal.

That's not to say that I feel hopeless about the enterprise. I am going to keep trying to quit. I just think using moral language to talk about it isn't always so helpful.
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:56 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


cotton dress sock: "I just think using moral language to talk about it isn't always so helpful."

And I think it leads to the resignation we see in the video. If it's moralized into an unreasonable choice, peoples' reasons are deligitimized and forgotten. People have been smoking for literally forever, it's a detrimental thing with positive side-effects that people do, like not-exercise, work too much, eat badly, and so on. I'm starting to sound like yes-that-Joe Jackson [PDF] though.
posted by rhizome at 11:05 AM on May 14, 2015


Mom quit in her 40s after smoking for 25 years or so. She always said that if the doctor told her she was a goner, the first thing she would do would be to buy a carton of Benson & Hedges.
posted by ob1quixote at 1:44 PM on May 14, 2015


. I just think using moral language to talk about it isn't always so helpful.

I didn't mean to be using moral language. It's purely pragmatic from my point of view. Talking about my own experience. I wasn't going to be able to quit until I did the things I described...smoking's too powerful. Some people never will have enough energy to overcome it; for whatever reason, for them maybe it's truly beyond their control, sure.

I hope that's a permanent state of affairs.

No reason it wouldn't be! I'm not sure of too many things, but one of them is that I'll never go back. The desire's completely gone, nothing but the gross part is left.

I know it's galling when ex-smokers talk about quitting. But if you want to quit, don't get hung up on that. The one thing I really object to is talking about smoking like it's really great. it's not great. It sucks.
posted by Miko at 2:27 PM on May 14, 2015


Smoking cigarettes
Just hanging out with my friends
Twenty friends per pack
posted by Fezboy! at 2:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


thelonius: "The "everyone dies" idea is bullshit; of course they do, but not of heart attacks at 50, or tongue cancer."

I'd be curious to learn what percentage of deaths are not attributable to lifestyle choices, or "true" natural causes. Not sure where undetected genetic maladies ("John Ritter's Disease") would fit in there, but still.

For me, vaporizers the benefit of separating nicotine and the act of smoking from the "weed on fire near my face" particulate-smoke aspect. I don't know if this is just rationalizing a refinement of a bad habit, but I figure that as long as there isn't fire-smoke involved there are worse things than nicotine addiction. This is after generally smoking a pack/day for 25+ of the last 30-35 years.
posted by rhizome at 2:59 PM on May 14, 2015


I'd be curious to learn what percentage of deaths are not attributable to lifestyle choices, or "true" natural causes.

I think this is nearly impossible to know because of epigenetic factors and also the nature of complicating factors (heart disease + pneumonia, emphysema +infection, etc).
posted by Miko at 11:20 AM on May 15, 2015


For those interested, I've created a Fanfare section for This Is Actually Happening.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:51 PM on May 17, 2015


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