In Britain, a New Law Targeting a Beloved Vice Would Shock Americans. I Surprised Myself With My Reaction.

"Smoking, or at least the idea of smoking, has undoubtedly had a comeback recently. Celebrities are smoking again, or so it seems, since there are popular Instagram accounts dedicated to posting photos of them doing it. There have been pieces like the provocatively headlined " I Mean, Why Shouldn't We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?" in the Cut, and a much-discussed feature in the New York Times in 2022 which interviewed young people outside bars in New York about why they loved smoking, full of try-hard reflections from the likes of Martin Amis' daughter, no less, like "It is a joy to be contemporarily atypical.""

"Partly, the new cigarette boom is due to the pandemic: People were miserable and stressed out and so leaned back into bad old habits. Partly it's also a nostalgia for a 1990s of the imagination: a time before phones and before so many other social evils when people seemed casually glamorous and smoked a lot more cigarettes. But it runs even deeper than that, I think. A friend of mine coined the term "luxury fatalism" a few years ago to describe a sort of devil-may-care nihilistic attitude of which smoking is a part: Everything is going to shit and the future looks bleak, so you may as well have as much fun as you can where you can find it. Buy the shoes, go on the holiday, smoke the cigarette."

"I get it. I have been very addicted to smoking on and off since my late teens. I too, have enjoyed many hundreds of cigarettes outside bars, at house parties, on sun loungers. I don't smoke anymore, because it's stupid and expensive and bad for you and all the other big-hitter reasons. But I do get it. Things may be about to change permanently on the tobacco front here in the U.K., though. Our government has just passed a new law that, rather than restricting cigarette sales to over-18s, would mean that people born afte"

Smoking has reappeared in public life, with celebrities smoking again and social media accounts sharing images. Media coverage has framed cigarette smoking as appealing to young people, including interviews and reflective commentary. The renewed interest is partly linked to pandemic-era stress and misery, leading people back to familiar habits. It is also connected to nostalgia for a 1990s style of glamour before smartphones and other modern social concerns. A deeper driver is “luxury fatalism,” a devil-may-care nihilism that treats the future as bleak and encourages immediate pleasures. In the UK, a new law is set to change tobacco access by targeting people born after a certain date rather than relying only on age restrictions.

Read at Slate Magazine