I was surprised when I was quitting smoking that my friend (who also smoked) was advocating vaping instead. I asked: Why not just quit completely?
I do think vaping is less dangerous than actually smoking but not doing either one is best for your health. Even getting “hooked” on nicotine gum or similar is better than smoking or vaping. But again, best to just quit nicotine / smoking / vaping completely.
Switching to vaping and slowly cutting back on nicotine was integral to me eventually quiting.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all opposed to vaping as a stepping stone to quitting. I tried it myself for a little while one of the times I was trying to quit.
And, again, I do think that vaping is less dangerous than actually smoking. But best to quit all of it completely.
Yeah you’re not wrong. It’s about harm reduction though. If the people who wouldn’t quit if they tried quitting for good switch to vaping they’ll be better off. Vaping only makes sense for current smokers, no one else should be using them. They are more harmful than nothing, but way way less harmful than tobacco.
Quitting cold turkey and failing sometimes prevents people from trying again.
I think people need to PRACTICE quitting and I wish more people had this mentality. Assuming that you’ll succeed at something so difficult the first of many times of trying to do it is unrealistic. It took me several attempts and taking a class about it to quit smoking.
“I couldn’t climb the mountain the first time I tried with no practice or help, therefore I’m never trying again” is very defeatist. Quitting is a process and practicing quitting is completely acceptable. Learn what didn’t work that time and develop strategies to deal with what didn’t work.
I have a bunch of tips from the class I took that I still mostly remember. I wonder how much of that info is online.
That’s a really good point. No one would expect someone’s first painting to turn out to be worth millions.
I feel like the generally accepted wisdom on the issue is that quitting smoking is hard. Whichever one works for you is the best one.
For me, “harm reduction” was just a convenient excuse for not really trying… And, I eventually decided, again, this is my experience, not advice, but, like, eventually, every method of quitting will eventually be cold turkey, so I just went for it.
Personally I found the nicotine addiction is overstated. I never had any trouble making it through 8 hours of sleep without a cigarette, so my claim that I needed one every hour or two kinda seemed like bullshit. Also, if I was so hung up on nicotine addiction - nicotine starts declining in your system almost immediately, so, if I was smoking for 5 minutes of every hour, I was spending 55 minutes of every hour in nicotine withdrawal. That’s… dumb. That’s a dumb way to live.
(I was also a heroin addict from when I was a teenager until my late 20s - and - at least heroin lasts a while. Nicotine is a garbage drug.)
In the end, smoking is a habit - and there’s not much in the way of shortcuts to changing your habits - and it’s especially hard when your enjoy it. There are better techniques and worse techniques, but no cure.
For me, when me and my wife added tiny little people to the world, I realized that they would prefer me to be alive, and I didn’t want to make them sad, so I quit.
Quitting heroin changes what you think of as hard but even my mom never quit cigarettes even after quitting heroin.
I’m very conflicted about vaping. On the one hand I’m happy it exists as I think it can definitely help some people quit smoking.
On the other hand I dislike it as it lowers the entry into smoking and also has the adverse effect. ( My opinion ) It’s probably also not great for your lungs to inhale steam on a regular basis.
As a non smoker at least my clothes don’t smell like smoke/tobacco, doesn’t stink up the room and there’s no people holding their cigarette nexto them so it doesn’t blow in their face, while it’s smoking in mine all the time ( e.g.: at a bar outside ). Super annoying( though not deliberate on their end ). Vaping at least solves that issue for non smokers compared to ciggies.
Good on you for quitting!
It’s not just “steam” in vapes, there’s also the chemicals used to vaporize the liquid, and of course the flavors themselves. I’m not a scientist but I can’t imagine it’s good for you. Breathing regular air in a big city isn’t great for you - like, bacon causes cancer - we probably don’t want to assume the best for directly inhaling inadequately studied chemicals
alternate take: personal freedom of movement, whether bidedal, or automated, is a thing of value, as is electricity, clean running water, and a majority of what modern technology provides. it, like most everything else can be done better, and cleaner. not the same argument as smoking, which was always an “entertainment”, as apposed to transportation and perambulation which are a necessity. thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Exactly right. We should celebrate the possibilities and freedom that modern technology gives us. EVs are an amazing invention and nitpicking for tiny issues that they don’t solve is a level beyond First World Problems.
The only things EV’s solve is emissions. They reduce emissions in cities which is great, and thanks to clean power plants (renewable and nuclear) help reduce overall emissions. But they are still cars, still take up space, they are heavier so cause more wear on the road surfaces and emit tire particles. I wouldn’t say these are tiny issues.
If we have to use cars then yes, electric are better, but it’s not the solution. The solution should aim at reducing use of the inefficient forms of transport in favor of mass transit or micro mobility.
Better urban planning, as well. We can’t do anything about cars as long as we build entire communities to accommodate cars. We’ve gone from people owning cars to cars owning society.
Mass transit is inefficient compared to having your own car. Pretending mass transit can completely get rid of cars is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.
Are you high? Mass transit is a thousand times more efficient than cars.
How many cars on a highway, on streets contain only 1 person? How long are people sitting on the road, idling because of traffic lights or no movement because of there being too many cars?
How much land is taken up by highways, freeways, exit ramps, and interchanges that could be better used for homes and parks and shops?
The point of public mass transit is not to eliminate car traffic, because there will always be a use for it, but we should try to minimize it as much as possible. Only car-brained Americans think mass transit is inefficient and “freedumb-restricting” because our mass transit systems have been massively underfunded and downright eliminated for a century.
Oddly enough I think he meant that having your own car is more efficient than mass transit for the individual. And really, we’re talking about time spent traveling more so than overall energy spent.
It takes me less time to get in my car and drive downtown than it does to wait on a bus to arrive and eventually get me to where I’m going… Which is why cars are never going away.
You guys are both talking about different types of efficiencies.
That said, yours is the type of efficiency that MOST people are talking about when this discussion is had.
I don’t even think it’s efficient in that way either though.
I mean, sure, you can get in your car and start driving faster. But then you likely have to sit and wait at traffic lights, sit in traffic if you’re anywhere in a city, and find parking.
That just seems less efficient than getting to the nearest bus stop or train station and not having to deal with any of the trouble of driving. Of course, as long as the city is designed well, which you can’t find in the US.
This is so dependent on the area though.
Yes deep in cities you may be sitting forever, but inter city and rural travel is basically non stop 60-70 mile per hour travel.
Regardless of how you power it, bringing thousands of pounds of steel with you to get to work or buy grocceries is inefficient. Cities really need to rethink the way they build and zone to promote higher densities and encourage walkability.
It’s not even the energy that’s really the issue; it’s the space. Cars ruin cities by physically forcing origins and destinations to be far apart with wastelands of pavement in between. It destroys the viability of transit, makes it both laborious and downright unpleasant to walk, and even screws cities over financially because worthless pavement doesn’t generate tax revenue, but costs a lot to maintain.
Why the fuck would you want to walk to the grocery store and back?
Pretending people would rather do that than use a car makes you straight up delusional
I really enjoy walking to my grocer instead of driving. I walk through a quiet neighbourhood with some large trees. Theres a hill with a nice view midway.
Hauling 50 pounds of groceries a couple miles is not enjoyable for the vast majority of people.
You need to rethink how cities are designed for walking to grocery stores to work. It won’t in the US, because everything is designed for cars. But if a city is designed right, you won’t need to go miles before finding a grocery store. You can take a cargo bike to haul more things at a time. You can stop by shops on your way home from work to pick up a couple things and stick them in a backpack.
Cities designed correctly reduce the burden on those walking or biking between points of interest that are no more than 1 or 2 miles away.
Yeah, I can imagine that. Tobacco companies have been selling better smoking (first, electric cigarettes, then vapes) for decades.
Without control, companies will always want to sell more
First the cigarette itself was marketed as better than rolling your own. Next came filters, so called “light” and “ultralight” versions of existing products, electric cigs, then finally vapes.
Vaping is actually very helpful and it’s probably helped a lot of people stop smoking.
The only problem was the fact that they got away with doing shit like advertising it to kids and making it cool. Fix that problem and vaping is almost literally only an advantage compared to cigarettes.
And even with more people taking it up, it’s still unhealthy but it’s like mildly unhealthy instead of cigarettes where it’s like oh yeah you’re going to double your chance of dying at 50.
Vaping is actually very helpful and it’s probably helped a lot of people stop smoking.
Being marginally less unhelpful than some other very unhelpful thing is still objectively unhelpful.
Marginally is a massive understatement. Maybe in 50 years we’re going to discover that it causes some crazy side effects, but in comparison to smoking it’s like having a hamburger once a week compared to three a day.
The point is, its amount of helpfulness is still negative, not positive.
For someone who is a smoker and otherwise would not be able to quit its helpfulness as immensely positive.
For every smoker vaping helps, it also tempts probably at least one person to start using who didn’t before. Therefore, it is 1000% indisputably negative and everybody trying to make excuses for it is a goddamn enabler.
Imagine if we ran out of war. All those jobs in the military and the military industrial complex!
