13 July 2021
Compelling Reasons Why I Should Quit Smoking
About a week ago I decided that enough was enough – again. I set a date (Monday 12 July 2021) and decided that I would stop smoking on that day. The day came round and sure enough, after my last packet of cigarettes had been empty for around an hour my willpower collapsed. I toddled down to the local shop and guiltily built some more. Now it’s Tuesday morning and I’ve run out of cigarettes again.
Obviously, I’m more than just physically addicted – it’s psychological too (really, Mr Holmes?). So, I’m going to do something I haven’t tried before. Each day I’m going to write down a compelling reason why I should quit smoking (I used “quit” instead of the more British “give up” in the title because most of my readership are American). I don’t plan to post this on social media, however. I may be publicly shaming myself to Kuriositas’ regulars, but there’s no need for me to go out of the way to highlight my human frailties to the rest of the internet: my family are more than happy to point those out. So, I’m happy for my ramblings about quitting smoking to stay in this quiet corner of the web…
What I do hope is that writing about my (probably failed) attempt to give up will provide a psychological spur to me, a daily reminder to help convince my hopelessly addicted brain that there are many, many very good reasons for giving up.
As I write, I keep on thinking about how a cigarette right now would be really, really, really good.
Compelling Reason #1 – Price
Tuesday 13 July 2021I’m writing this in the UK where cigarettes are taxed to the point where “tailor-made” are unaffordable for a lot of people and “roll your own” is often the choice. I’m still on packets and my brand is about average price in the UK. My local supermarket sells them for £9.80 for twenty but local shops (aka convenience stores) often add a pound on to that because they can. In American, that’s $13.58 at today’s exchange rate.
In a month of 30 days that’s £294 ($407). In a year of 12 months that’s £3528 ($4888). In ten years that would be… well that math is easy enough. Holy crab apple. If my employer gave me a 3.5k pay rise I would be so happy I would perform double summersaults down the street even though I would probably have to promise dark and unspeakable things in order to merit such an incredible increment. I seem to be unable to award myself one, however, simply by giving up the ciggies. So, this is the first compelling reason – an appeal to my natural avarice.
