What the cigarette seems to pay

Nobody keeps up an expensive, inconvenient habit for years for no reason. If you've smoked for a long time, the cigarette seems to be paying you something, and I'd like to list the payments fairly before I question any of them.

The first is calm. This is the big one, and it's the payment most smokers mention first. A cigarette settles you when you're wound up, and the idea of facing a bad day without one is the main reason stopping feels frightening.

The second is concentration. You think better with one. A difficult piece of work, a long drive, a form that needs filling in. The cigarette seems to sharpen you, and without it your mind wanders.

The third is the break. A cigarette is five minutes that belong to you. It gets you out of the building, away from the screen or the children or the argument, and nobody questions it.

Then there's pleasure. Some cigarettes are just good. The one with the first coffee and the one after a meal are the obvious ones, and so is the one in a pub garden on a warm evening. You may not enjoy all twenty, but you enjoy those.

Company is a payment too. Smokers talk to each other. You've met people at back doors and in smoking areas that you'd never have spoken to inside, and some of them became friends.

Cigarettes also fill time. Waiting for a bus, waiting for a friend who's late, an empty half hour at home. A cigarette gives the time a shape.

There's weight. You may believe smoking keeps your weight down, and you may have put weight on the last time you stopped.

And there's the matter of who you are. After enough years, smoking stops being something you do and becomes part of how you see yourself. Your friends know you as someone who smokes. The habit has a place in your history, some of it fond.

That's eight, and I don't think any of them is stupid. Each rests on something you've really felt. If a book tells you these are all illusions and you're a fool for believing them, close it, because the person who wrote it hasn't been paying attention.

My claim is narrower than that. For each payment, I'll ask the same question, and I'd like you to keep it with you. Did this cigarette add something, or did it give something back?

Adding means you ended up better off than a non-smoker in the same spot. Giving back means you ended up level with them, having started below. From the inside the two feel identical, because all you can feel is the change. You can't feel where you started. That's why it takes some reasoning, and a bit of watching yourself, to tell which one you're getting.

For most of the list I'll argue it's giving back. For two or three the answer is more mixed. The break really is a break, the company really is company, and there's a small true thing in the concentration claim. I'll say so when we get there. Where a payment meets a real need, I'll try to show that the need is fine and the cigarette is an odd way to meet it.

You already know the costs, so I'll name them once and move on. There's your health, which I said I wouldn't lecture you about. There's the money. There's the smell, the cough, the standing outside in February, and the low worry that sits behind all of it. And there's one cost people rarely count, which is the planning. You check your pockets before you leave the house. You work out when you'll next be able to have one. You get uneasy on trains. A part of your attention is always on supply, and it has been for so long that you may not notice it's there.