Ages 17–33
The day I walked out of that school in Idaho, my buddy bought me a pack of smokes.
Camel Turkish Golds. I just remember the weight of the pack in my hand, the cellophane crinkling as I peeled it off, the tap-tap-tap of the pack against my palm to settle the tobacco. That smooth fwap of removing the foil. The first cigarette out of a fresh pack, there’s a ritual to it, almost religious, and my body remembered every step like I’d never stopped. (I never did the lucky cigarette thing, I didn’t need luck.)
Three years without a cigarette. Three years of clean lungs and clear breathing and whatever the hell they were teaching me in Idaho. Gone in one drag. I was back, I was rebelling from being in this weird ass school for 3 years and the one way I knew how was to smoke these harmless little things.
From that moment forward, smoking wasn’t something I did. It was who I was. It might as well have been listed on my driver’s license under distinguishing features: brown hair, brown eyes, smells like a chimney. And I did not care.
Man, it’s actually crazy to think about it. My friend’s Dad was a chain smoker and I remember being disgusted by it when I was like 8, but literally a year later, I was going in on it. Absolutely wild.
My brands. Smokers will understand this, and non-smokers need to.
American Spirit Blues were my main for many years. Packed tight, rolled out a bit, they burned slow, that slightly earthy taste, but I liked them because they were harder to smoke fast. Harsher without burning fast. I wanted as much cigarette as possible. I’d tell people I smoked them because they were “more natural,” which is like saying you drink organic vodka. You’re still killing yourself, you’re just being pretentious about it. I would still chain smoke them, but they were expensive! $4.10 a pack.
Camel Wides became my final love, my absolute cigarette. Thick, satisfying, made you feel like you were smoking a cigar’s younger brother. Like Arthur and his big ass purple crayon, but instead of drawing my imagination, I was destroying my future.
Never Lights.
Never huge on menthol, though I’d smoked plenty of Newport shorts in a box as a kid. My friend smoked Kool Milds, was like getting knocked into a snow drift. I just didn’t want to smoke a snow storm, I preferred my tobacco straight. And I chain smoked. All of it. All the time. If you offered me a cigarette, I’d say yes and talk shit while I smoked it.
Woke up, smoked. Went to bed, smoked. Did anything in between, smoked. Eating breakfast, cigarette. Driving to work, cigarette. Getting out of the car, cigarette. Waiting for something, cigarette. Finished doing something, cigarette. Bored, cigarette. Stressed, cigarette. Happy, cigarette. Sad, cigarette. Cigarettes cigarettes cigarettes.
I smoked like the building was on fire and I was personally responsible for maintaining the smoke level.
People who’ve never been serious smokers don’t understand this: it’s not just about the nicotine. It’s about the logistics. Smoking restructures your entire life. Every decision you make from where you go, who you’re with, how long you stay, how you get there, it all runs through a filter (no pun intended) of can I smoke there.
Every place had to have a patio or a smoking section. Non-smoking bars? Didn’t exist in my world. Non-smoking restaurants? I’d rather not eat. If a place didn’t let me smoke, that place didn’t get my business, my presence, or a single second of my time.
Weather didn’t matter. Twelve degrees and snowing? I’m on the patio. Hundred and fifteen in the shade? I’m on the patio. Hurricane warning? You better believe I’m on the patio, one hand holding my cigarette and the other holding onto the railing so I don’t blow into the next county.
Company didn’t matter either. Your birthday party is at a non-smoking venue? Sorry, can’t make it. Family reunion at a park where smoking’s banned? Wish I could be there. Kid’s school event in an auditorium? I’ll be in the parking lot. If I’m being honest, most of the time I would just go, smoke and play dumb until I would get told to stop and I would “leave out of embarrassment” or whatever. (Wonderful excuse to leave) I would literally just go outside on the phone. I was IN my friend’s wedding and there’s pictures of me DURING THE (outdoor) ceremony stepped off to the side smoking!
Cigarettes didn’t just control when I smoked. They controlled everything. My movements. My destinations. My friendships. All of it.
And the insane part to me is that I did see it and I didn’t care. I think most people that read this and still smoke probably think either “wow that’s exactly me” or “wow I would never be this weird about smoking” and either is fine. This isn’t a contest for me. I already beat it, I know you can beat it. So, use this mentality to beat it. Understand that it might control your life, even if ONE DECISION was ever made for smoking. And understand that you are READING THIS because smoking is MAKING YOU seek out alternative methods of help to quit. That is OKAY. Get over yourself, you are getting closer to your time to quit. It might actually fucking stick this time. Wouldn’t that be crazy. I never thought I’d be here years later with no nicotine in me, I literally could have never.
Indiana.
I was living in Indiana during my college years. Go Boilermakers! The city passed a smoking ban. Restaurants, bars, public spaces, no more indoor smoking. This was part of the broader wave of smoking bans that rolled through the country in the mid-2000s, and for most people, it was a minor inconvenience. Step outside, smoke, come back in. Not ideal, but not life-altering. We literally had smoke-ins in the bars to revolt the smoking ban, it’s so crazy to think about.
Well, the city across the river still allowed indoor smoking. So I moved my drinking across the river. Changed my apartment. Changed my entire bar scene. Changed my daily routine, my commute, my social circle.
Because of smoking.
I need you to sit with that for a second. A city passed a law saying I couldn’t smoke inside a bar, and my response was not to smoke outside, or to cut back, or to take it as a sign that maybe the world was trying to tell me something. My response was to relocate. To uproot my life and replant it somewhere that would accommodate my addiction.
And I didn’t even think it was weird. I had a hundred rationalizations. The rent was better across the river. The bars were more fun over there anyway. The commute wasn’t that different. All technically true. All completely beside the point. The point was that nicotine told me to move, and I moved.
I also moved to California for many years, which became very easy to smoke on patios, so I was satisfied. I lived in Oakland, sure I couldn’t smoke in bars, but I was on the sunny side of the bay and at least at the time, no one gave a fuck about smoking on the patio.
But then it hit me. I could smoke indoors places in the world still. I went to Las Vegas with some friends and realized I could smoke inside.
So…
I fucking moved to Las Vegas because I could smoke indoors.
I. Moved. To. Las Vegas. Because. I. Could. Smoke. Indoors.
Was it the only reason? No. It wasn’t the only reason. There were other factors… the weather, the energy, the opportunities, the lifestyle. Vegas had a lot going for it. But was the indoor smoking a huge perk? Was it a major factor in the decision? Did I specifically choose a city in the desert, two thousand miles from where I’d been living, in large part because I could sit at a bar or a blackjack table or a restaurant and smoke to my heart’s content without anyone asking me to step outside?
Yes. Absolutely yes. Without question.
I was twenty-five years old, and I got a job at NVIDIA. The NVIDIA, one of the most important technology companies on the planet.
The job was chip testing. I worked the overnight shift, which was perfect for me, fewer people, less oversight, great money for relatively straightforward work. I’d put on the full hazmat-style suit, set chips into testing stations, and wait. The chips took about thirty minutes per round to test. So I’d set them, and then I had thirty minutes to kill.
I listened to Rich Dad Poor Dad on my iPod during those waits. Learned about assets and liabilities and passive income while wearing a clean suit in a chip fab that probably cost more than some countries’ GDP. It was a good gig. A really good gig. Easy work, good pay, great company. They wanted to promote me early on. Actual upward mobility at one of the biggest names in tech.
And I lost it because I couldn’t stop smoking.
The thirty-minute waits between testing rounds. At first, I stayed in the facility, listened to my iPod, did what I was supposed to do. But thirty minutes is a long time when you’re a 3-pack-a-day smoker. Thirty minutes is an eternity. So I started going outside during the waits. Just a quick smoke. Set the chips, go outside, smoke one, come back. No big deal.
Except it was never just one. And “outside” wasn’t exactly next door, getting out of the clean room, out of the suit, out of the facility, finding a smoking spot, smoking, and then going through the whole process in reverse took time. More time than I admitted to myself.
They figured it out. Of course they did, I had to scan into the facility every time I left. And I knew that, I just didn’t think they would care. No one told me I couldn’t smoke in those times, I think it was just kind of obvious that was probably not what you should do in your downtime. Still one fumble that, at the time, I did not think much of. Just “eh, they had a strict smoking rule.” Another crazy one to think about because I had jobs with stricter rules and less freedom, but when given the choice, I just nose-dived.
NVIDIA let me go.
What an easy gig. What was I thinking? I had a job at NVIDIA, a company that would become one of the most valuable in the world, and I traded it for smoke breaks. A career trajectory for a pack of cigarettes.
When I was thirty-two, I ended up in the hospital for Crohn’s disease. If you don’t know what Crohn’s is, it’s an inflammatory bowel condition, and when it flares, it flares hard. I was in bad shape. Bad enough for a seven-day hospital stay. Bad enough for serious pain management, and by serious, I mean dilaudid, which is essentially synthetic heroin. If you’ve ever had dilaudid, you know: it doesn’t just kill pain. It kills everything. Your pain, your anxiety, your awareness of your own existence. It’s heavy-duty.
I was on a dilaudid drip for seven days.
And every single day, multiple times a day, I disconnected my IV from the wall unit, hung the bag on the rolling pole, wheeled that pole into the elevator, rode it down to the ground floor, wheeled myself outside in my hospital gown with my ass hanging out the back, and chain smoked.
On dilaudid.
I have a picture of me riding one of the cement turtle statues in my hospital gown with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and an IV in my hand.
I am a thirty-two-year-old man in a hospital gown, tethered to an IV pole, high on synthetic opioids, riding a statue of a turtle outside a hospital in whatever weather was happening, chain smoking cigarettes. The IV line is still in my arm. The bag of fluids and drugs is still dripping. I am still, technically, a patient. I just happen to be a patient who is outside, poisoning himself with one substance while another substance drips into his veins to manage the disease that the first substance is probably making worse.
Then I’d go back upstairs. And I’d ask for more dilaudid. And they’d give it to me. And I’d wait a little while, and then I’d go out and do it again.
The nurses gave me shit. Of course they did. They’re medical professionals watching a patient, a patient with an inflammatory condition, a patient on serious medication, a patient who should be resting and healing, voluntarily going outside to inhale carcinogens and carbon monoxide.
But I’m a charming character (or so I think) so the nurses only said so much. I remember them hating me for it, but I also remember them not pushing too hard, because what are you going to do? I was an adult making a legal choice, even if that choice was monumentally stupid.
The hospital actually threatened to kick me out. Told me straight: if you keep leaving to smoke, we’ll discharge you. And my response, my actual, real, spoken-out-loud response, was that if they wanted to, they could.
I chose smoking over hospital care. I looked at medical professionals who were trying to keep me alive and said, essentially, I’d rather smoke than be treated for my disease.
During the heavy years, the chimney years, I’d occasionally go to the ER for my Crohn’s flares. And sometimes, an ER doctor would mention nicotine. Not in the way you’d expect.
Some of them told me about the “positives” of nicotine. That there was research showing nicotine had cognitive benefits. That it might help with focus, with certain neurological conditions. That it wasn’t the nicotine itself that was the primary danger, it was the delivery system. Or that it could help calm my stomach.
And I held onto that information like a drowning man holds onto a piece of wood.
I remember my fiancée rolled her eyes out of her head at an ER doctor once and immediately outburst “DONT TELL HIM THAT” because she knew. And she was right!
You have no idea how desperately a smoker wants to hear that smoking isn’t that bad. Every shred of evidence, every half-formed study, every doctor who says “well, nicotine itself…”, we grab it. We clutch it to our chest. We build an entire fortress of rationalization around it.
Nicotine has cognitive benefits. See? It’s helping me think.
It’s the tar and chemicals that are dangerous, not the nicotine. So really, I just need a better delivery system.
Some studies suggest nicotine may help with Crohn’s. It’s basically medicine at this point.
I was absolutely terrified of accepting that smoking was killing me, because accepting that meant I’d have to do something about it, and doing something about it meant quitting, and quitting meant… what? Who was I without cigarettes? What did I do with my hands? Where did I go? Who did I hang out with?
My entire life, my identity, my social world, my daily routine, my travel decisions, my home, my career trajectory, all of it was built around smoking. By accident and totally subconsciously. NONE of this “went through my head” but it was just… there.
Taking smoking away wasn’t like removing a bad habit. It was like removing a load-bearing wall. The whole structure subconsciously felt like it would collapse.
So I held onto whatever scraps of good news any doctor would give me, and I used them as mortar to patch the cracks, and I kept smoking.
Numbers have a way of cutting through bullshit.
The average smoker takes about ten to fifteen smoke breaks per day, at roughly five to ten minutes each. Call it seventy-five minutes a day, being conservative. That’s one hour and fifteen minutes, every day, dedicated to the act of smoking.
I was not an average smoker. I was well above average. But let’s use the average, because the math is horrifying enough without inflating it.
Seventy-five minutes a day. That’s 456 hours a year. That’s nineteen full days, twenty-four-hour days, spent doing nothing but smoking. Over the sixteen years from graduation to when I finally quit, that’s over three hundred days. Nearly a full year of my life, spent standing in parking lots and on patios and outside hospitals, inhaling burning tobacco.
But that’s just the smoking itself. That doesn’t count the time spent buying cigarettes, the detours to gas stations, the extra time at airports going through security twice. It doesn’t count the time spent looking for a lighter, patting down pockets, asking strangers for a light. It doesn’t count the time spent choosing restaurants and bars and hotels based on smoking access. It doesn’t count the time spent having the same argument with the same people about why I wasn’t going to quit.
When you add all of that up, the smoking, the logistics, the lifestyle accommodations, a reasonable estimate is that a dedicated smoker like me loses close to two full years over a sixteen-year smoking career. Two years. Gone. Evaporated into a cloud of smoke that dissipated before it even reached the ceiling.
Two years I could have spent with family. Two years I could have spent building an online business. Two years I could have spent traveling to places more than three flight-hours away. Two years I could have spent at theme parks, at non-smoking restaurants, at family events I skipped because I couldn’t light up.
Two years I set on fire, one cigarette at a time. But I fucking loved smoking.
I wish someone had told me this at seventeen. Or twenty-five. Or thirty-two in that hospital bed.
Cigarettes didn’t just control when I smoked. They controlled where I lived. I moved across a river because of cigarettes. I moved to Las Vegas because of cigarettes. They controlled where I worked, or more accurately, where I stopped working, because I couldn’t go thirty minutes without a smoke break. They controlled who I spent time with, because my social circle self-selected for other smokers or people willing to tolerate me disappearing every forty-five minutes. They controlled what I experienced, because entire categories of human activity, theme parks, long flights, indoor events, non-smoking venues, were simply off-limits.
They controlled my health decisions. I chose cigarettes over hospital treatment. I chose cigarettes over medical advice. I chose cigarettes over my own body’s desperate, screaming demand that I stop.
They controlled my self-image. I held onto cherry-picked medical factoids about nicotine’s “benefits” because I was too terrified to let go of the story that smoking was a choice I was making freely. Admitting it was an addiction meant admitting I wasn’t in control. And I needed to be in control. That was the whole point of the tough-guy, take-no-shit, I-do-what-I-want persona. It was armor. And underneath the armor was a guy who couldn’t go thirty minutes without a cigarette and had rearranged his entire existence to make sure he’d never have to.
If that’s not your definition of being controlled by a substance, I genuinely want to know what is. Because I’ve looked at this from every angle. I’ve run every rationalization. I’ve heard every argument that smokers make, I made them all myself, for sixteen years. And there is no version of this story where I was in control.
The cigarettes were in control. I was just the guy holding them.
And I do not LIKE to be controlled, and I do not WANT to have my destiny picked for me. And that’s why, when I realized what the fuck was going on, I needed to wake up. And you need to wake up. This shit is going to kill you one day. And I know EVERYTHING can kill you, but man not EVERYTHING is going to make you drown from the inside. Think about it. Man. Think about it.
And if you’re still smoking right now, if you’re reading this book with a cigarette in your hand or a pack in your pocket or one waiting for you on the porch as your “reward” for getting through a chapter, I need you to ask yourself one honest question:
When’s the last time you chose where to eat without thinking about whether you could smoke there? When’s the last time you sat through a movie without counting the minutes until you could get outside? When’s the last time you made a decision, any decision, without nicotine being a factor?
If you can’t remember, you have your answer.
You’re not in control. You haven’t been for a long time.
But here’s the good news, and I promise you, there is good news coming in this book: neither was I. And I got out. I feel pretty fucking proud, pretty fucking cocky of where I am today with it. But it’s cause holy shit man, I needed help and I needed a way out and I needed someone to tell me to just fucking sack up, grab my quit kit and take it head on. That’s what I am telling you to do right now.
You aren’t going to quit, not today. Today, just sit with the truth. Let it settle. Let it get uncomfortable.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about what comes next.