No, smoking isn’t back This is the last gasp of a dying habit

For new Gen Z smokers, being “iconic” is the habit’s only social appeal — and it is entirely offset by other ideological neuroses. This is a generation which is so bound by the strictures of self-censorship, so boggled by the conventions of social media, that they have begun to use the term “unalived” instead of “killed” in general conversation. They are wimps, and looking cool (the only incentive for anybody ever to have picked up their first cigarette) cannot survive this.

Besides, is vice itself cool anymore? Once, substances were era-defining. From the birth of counterculture, each decade had their corresponding drug: the Sixties has its slow insanity, its hierarchy-smashing lassitude, the wonder-filled inertia of acid and marijuana. The Seventies has its bleak heroin, its fall from innocence, a decade of dark. The Eighties was all manic extravagance, cocaine to a T. On the dubiously sticky floors of Studio 54, the fast-paced, high-cost, high-speed shit chatting of coke crystallised that era’s gaudy hedonism. The Nineties had its euphoric, crashing manias, its acid house, its MDMA. After that, house parties dabbled in micro-trends — the bath salts, the ket, the NOS — but youth culture in general had by now stabilised, fuelled by immortal alcohol and a cocktail of other things that had all come before, becoming smugly ironic. All the while, smoking limped on, a sulky vampire in the corner of every sweaty student bedroom.

Vapes have blown all of this clean out of the water. During Covid, sprawled on Power Rangers bedspreads or being stared at by ancient posters of long-gone boy bands, students who should by rights have been frying their brains in nightclubs began to dream of other possible lives. Another vision of young adulthood began to curl into shape on their TikTok feeds: one in which you might declare yourself, with a straight face, “sober curious”. I recall how, in the first tentative gatherings post pandemic, it became immediately clear that these new habits had already set in: erstwhile “legends” were now “Bristol sober” (just doing ketamine); soon-to-be ex-friends were doing dry January (zealots). Being sober at uni changed, when I was there, from totally verboten to semi-acceptable, even admirable. Club culture began to fizzle out — and with it, the vomit-swallowing teenager trying to remember which way to light a Marlboro Gold.

This shift has brought with it a sense that actually, smoking might be unappealing. Not just vibes-wise, but sensually: “I feel like I can taste their bronchitis”, says one friend, who dislikes kissing smokers (but is known to pilfer rollies himself). There is a recognition that cigarettes may not only kill you slowly in the future (they are the largest single cause of cancer in the UK) but may usher in a kind of social death — may make your clothes honk, turn your fingers yellow, fragrance your breath with eau de ashtray.

The old guard have become indignant outcasts — like in that IT Crowd sketch, aired two months after the original smoking ban came in, where Jen must brave a literal Siberia outside her office alongside the other addicts; Russian accents through chattering teeth. The image of vapes, conversely, is entirely different and wonderfully new: they are marketed as consequence-free, fresh and fruity solutions sailing straight out of techland. You can buy one fairly cheaply without knowing how to roll or having to buy a lighter, papers and filters, all the while anxiously hiding the smell from your parents. And you don’t have to like the admittedly challenging taste of burning leaves to claim camaraderie with other smokers, or for a reason to leave a dancefloor. So perfectly executed was the e-cig takeover that the number of vapoteurs has now hit an all-time high.

The minor smoking revival that we’re seeing now is simply a last bronchial gasp. Cigarettes have become subsumed in clouds of various half-hearted “aesthetics” — Anthony Bourdain sitting at a European cafe table wearing little black sunglasses; Kate Moss; ghosts from Tumblrs past. Gone is the Marlboro Man, swashbuckling his way around the West in a 10-gallon hat. For Gen Z have other options: they can vape, use the lisp-inducing abomination that is Zyn, or smugly abstain in favour of other “hyperfixations”. Only this generation could swap cigs for “journalling”.

And why shouldn’t they? Many of them have grown up around wrinkled, spluttering adults who were once slick, young smokers. I will not forget meeting a dying great aunt, Marlene, who the family called Auntie Marlboro, sparking up in her old people’s home between liquidy-lunged coughs. I was about 15, and I remember crying in front of her (she, fag in hand, was unfazed). It did not kill her in the end — on the contrary, it kept her sharp — but you couldn’t help but feel sorry for that yellowed woman in her yellowing, sunlit living room. That is, really, what smoking is about.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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