What influences play a role in the reasons why people choose to smoke cigarettes? Does family history, friends, peer pressure, advertising, celebrities, certain workplaces, social settings, drinking alcohol or curiosity factor into a person's choice for smoking cigarettes? Does boredom, rebellion, other drug uses or relationships contribute to a person's decision to smoke cigarettes? Does easy access to purchase cigarettes make it easier to smoke? Does stress lead a person to smoke? What are the reasons why a person chooses to smoke? The dangerous warnings on the labels of cigarettes has not stopped many from smoking the results in serious conditions for babies, and those exposed to first hand and second hand smoking. Neither has the rising costs for a pack of cigarettes led to large numbers of people quitting. What is it about cigarettes?
Cigarettes are seen resting between the fingers and lips of famous people, parents, grand-parents, aunts, uncles, friends, co-workers, strangers, and advertisements on television and via billboards. They are advertised as candy cigarettes that turn into bubble gum, for little kids. They are advertised as stress relievers. They are advertised as socially popular. They are advertised as cool, relaxing and a part of everyday life.
Advertisements of cigarettes are illustrated in paid commercials and billboards, but also in movies, television shows, among friends and family and strangers on their breaks, waiting for buses, trains, taxis, and for their food. Advertisement exists in places that we may not even realize. But, as I watch my 2 year niece mimic everything she sees. I see how easy it is for any person to be influenced over and over again by the examples that they see. We are ever learning and our minds are ever influenced by what we see and hear.
We are influenced unconsciously and consciously by repetitive behaviors and words. We choose to make choices but do not realize that our choices will affect another person's life. Cigarette smoking has directly and indirectly affected the lives of millions of people through first hand and second hand smoke. However, many smokers never really discuss the reasons as to why they started smoking in the first place. Some have since quit. Others have attempted to quit. There are some that never plan to quit, regardless of their health.
Overall, there was something or someone that influenced their decision to smoke in the first place. Whether they realized it or not, smoking like many other things in our lives was influenced by inside and/or outside sources. I wonder if people ever really stop to think about what influenced them to take that first puff from a cigarette. I wonder if they had it to do over again, would they be smoking today or ever smoked? What really influenced their decision to smoke?
Why do people smoke cigarettes when they are so obviously bad for you?
It's an ironic question, really, because the answer's within. People smoke for the same reason they drink underage, or sneak out, or go joy riding in somebody else's car; for the same reason why a little kid keeps doing just what his mom told him not to; for the same reason why Eve just had to take an apple from the Tree of Knowledge; for the same reason why an elderly woman like my grandma, who has kept kindled her lust for life, just has to keep on living on her own out in the country instead of moving into a nursing home.
People do all these things precisely because it's what they're not supposed to do. These things are "bad" for them, "wrong", "foolish". But that is exactly what gives an action REAL value, real vibrancy. To break the rules, to transgress the boundaries: that is where the pulsing energy of life maintains its sacrament.
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[If you dam up a river long enough, one of two things will happen. Either the water will overflow the wall and the inhibiting structure will come crumbling down; or else the water will grow static, stagnant, rotten.
Every kid knows intimately the sacrament of transgression, deep in his heart. As we get older, our vigorous spirit is beat down more and more by culture and society. Most bow down and cowtow to these restrictive forces. But there are always some who maintain their vital charge, who display the amazing resiliency and depth of their love for life. For these few life never grows stagnant...
The majority are quick to condemn smoking, as with many other "unhealthy" habits. What they have forgotten is the value of spiritual health- the type of health which almost always (to some degree) coincides with a lifestyle others have condemned. What would be the point of living a hundred years, never breaking the "rules", if those one hundred years were stagnant and spirit-less?]
As an ex-smoker, the thing that influenced my smoking or not smoking the most was beer and particularly too much beer consumed in smokey bars.
I've been quit for 10 years now. Before that I smoked on and off for about 20 years. During that time I quit successfully several times for periods of at least one year and up to 5 years. Every single time I relapsed it happened when I had been drinking too much beer in a bar.
haha yeah ill agree with you on that as well
the masses.
we have too much damn time and we don't know what to do with ourselves.
Since I can't remove my comment about the inappropriate advertisement that some idiot posted, I'll say that I hate cigarette smoke and get really ticked off when ignorant smokers light a cigarette without asking anybody else if its okay. It also irks me that so many smokers think the world is their personal ashtray. My college doesn't have a smoking ban and we have to walk up lots of steps to enter the building. When I walk to the building there's always some idiot in front of me with a cigarette that I might as well be smoking myself. They need to ban smoking on the campus not just in the building. Many colleges are doing so and there is no difference between my college's smoking policy and a college smoking policy when I was born in 1988. You can't smoke inside but there are not restrictions placed on outside smoking and in he summer and spring, the smoke infiltrates the whole building because the doors are propped open. It's disgusting and so are the people who do it. What was this blog about anyways?
Hello, I has always seemed to me a mystery because the pleasure that some people in the cigarette, but I guess it is the same mystery that leads to the burgundy wine that is one of my greatest pleasures, mysteries of life? But I think that before anything should be given priority to health, bye!