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Comment by oxymoran | Hacker News Reader

Never smokers just don’t understand. It’s not that you don’t know that it’s bad for you(duh) or that you don’t want to quit. It is because it really is that hard to quit. For me, suppressing the desire to smoke felt like the worst restless leg syndrome but it wasn’t in my legs, it was deep down in the core of my being. Plus I genuinely enjoyed it. It took me over 10 years, dozens of attempts, and having a child(extra incentive) to finally overcome cigarettes.

And I don’t think I would have made it without the help of vaping which, yes, I also eventually quit. I made my own flavorless juice and titrated the nicotine down to zero which made it real easy to stop vaping at that point.

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We can understand.

I grew up in a household where chips, soda, and ice cream were dinner. I've been at points in my life where easily 70% of my daily calories were sugar. My body hurt and I felt like shit, but those moments where I took that first bite of ice cream in an hour were bliss.

Quitting it was fucking painful. I was tired, irritable, and had this constant feeling in the back of my throat of just needing some sweets. I managed to go a whole year without any sweets at all an finally forgot the feeling and managed to lose a bunch of weight, then someone gave me a box of chocolate and I've been trying to quit (and failing) for two years. Whenever I make some progress on quitting, someone offers me some sweets and the cycle starts all over again.

Just looking at the obesity problem in the world, I think loads of people are suffering from an equally debilitating addiction, but they're not targeted by ad campaigns asking them to quit, and they've never tried to do so. People who've tried to lose weight will often say it's incredibly tough, and a lot of experiences seem to align with what smokers describe.

Fasting might be easier than quitting sweets outright. Doing a 36-hour fast once a week is incredibly effective (basically skip a whole day, plus sleep)

Regarding other things "never smokers" may not understand:

Before I started smoking (relatively late in life), I didn't really grasp that smoking is non-trivially immediately psychoactive.

Like I thought it was something that you did just to do, and then it quietly wormed some sort of hook into your brain that made you feel bad if you stopped, but the whole thing happened entirely "subconsciously".

Maybe I was just especially retarded, and most people properly understand this.

There is no doubt that quitting smoking or nicotine products is incredible difficult for some people.

The worst thing about nicotine is how it alters reality so much. It’s like a science fiction mind control nightmare. From the outside I see people standing in the cold with a burning bit of crap in their mouth. To them it is among the most important thing in their lives.

It is why I think we should ban commercial sale of nicotine completely, whether through smoking or vaping. I’m not directing this at you personally, but I’m sick of hearing mind hacked smokers complaining about how hard it is to quit and how good their lives were standing in the cold with a burning piece of crap in their mouth. You want to grow your own tobacco and smoke it, be my guest. But letting someone make money from hacking your brain permanently? That is madness. If the brain was a software product you would urgently patch the nicotine receptor as a critical vulnerability.

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