A Cig for My Thoughts

I think its easy to say that a lot of people smoke cigarettes. Approximately 21% of adults ages 18+ smoke. During America’s booming era’s, cigarettes were well advertised in media all around the nation and also heavily in Miamian culture. Celebrities, tourists, and even women were all shown enjoying a good-ole’ tobacco stick. The factors leading people to visit Miami centralized around leisure; one of the main leisure activities that caught on the fastest, was smoking. Smoking evokes an appealing leisure which shifts into everyday life as modern society is incapable of dissociating the two. Above all, its addictive qualities sink in subconsciously as people reward themselves with harmful substances.

Smoking was portrayed in films, advertisements, and novels as a form of leisure to reward oneself. People would generally associate smoking during or after other leisure activities or leisure substances such as: relaxing after dinner, sex, coffee, alcohol, and driving. These visual images caused people to ultimately practice cigarette smoking daily.

Smokers like smoking in nice areas. South beach was portrayed as a fun, relaxing, and scenic environment. It attracted smokers just as it attracted a wide range of people for its culture and life. People would smoke as they drank at parties. Offering cigarettes to others, as well as lighting it for them, was a respectful gesture, and when the receiver would comment on how they also preferred the same taste in tobacco, it was a flattery. A scene of smokers is an inviting scene, everyone holding their cigarette in their own unique pose, laughing and smiling. Some exhale slower than others, some inhale longer than others. People would see a successful crowd enjoying a cigarette and relaxing after their hard work. This causes people in society to buy cigarettes because cigarettes are one of the few things the common man can have and enjoy the same way people portrayed in the media do.

Smoking alone is an escape from everyone else, yet you never feel alone. A cigarette burning, looking up at you, is a sense of comfort and a sense of a short term pleasantry you can enjoy to yourself. You become alienated, and begin to smoke cigarettes in public, yet you still feel this sense of alienation. You sit aside in a smokers area, your mind to itself, and others around you usually not talking and enjoying their cigarette. We build a tendency that we start to show in everyday life. A leisure, that becomes a habit, is unappreciated and seen as a daily addicticon that serves no purpose to others.