The navy didn't ban smoking on subs until 2010. That must have been something.
Think of something you really, really like doing. Something that calms or pleases you every time you do it. Like, playing a game, or reading a book, or eating your favourite food. Now imagine someone telling you that you don't have to do that, it's just a choice. Imagine being deprived of it and being guilt-tripped into it.
Sure you can wean yourself off it, but it'll take effort - uncomfortable, painful effort - and you might fail.
And meanwhile some idiot on the internet is saying it's all just a choice.
It is an addiction that was designed to be addictive by the manufacturers. It has never been a "mere choice". That first cigarette or two, maybe, but addiction is awful and horrible and doesn't deserve to be denigrated and reduced by flippancy.
There are people who can’t stop doing stupid stuff for attention (like breaking electronics for YouTube views or whatever), and we don’t blame “idiots” commenting online for their habits. There are people who refuse to eat vegetables and only eat junk food and we also don’t blame “idiots.”
Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.
Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit. There are loads of people who are glued to chairs all day and make bad food and exercise decisions and it becomes a lifelong habit that’s borderline impossible to break (doubly so if you face health consequences before you can change), but they don’t get sympathy. People tell them to simply make an effort to change if they actually want to change.
There are countless reasons people make bad choices: peer pressure, to calm anxiety, dealing with depression, and yeah, sometimes, abusive parents.
But you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance and saying "well, sucks to be you", and taking the high ground. Good for you, it must be great up there never having made a bad choice.
The moment somebody makes a poor choice does not mean we should then insist the game is over for them and it's their fault. That doesn't help them make better choices in future.
Quitting smoking is incredibly hard. I've done it multiple times sometimes for years at a time - that's how hard it is - and you will never understand it unless you've personally suffered from addiction yourself.
Do you think the attendees at Alcoholic Anonymous who stand up and say "I'm an alcoholic and haven't had a drink in 25 years" are being absurd, or speaking to a truth about addiction? Why do you think smokers have an easier time of it?
I've not smoked in almost 6 years today. In a poor context, in a poor moment, I could be back in there in a heartbeat.
It's not insufferable - I've suffered it - but you clearly and blatantly will never understand it.
So please, get off the high horse, accept everybody makes poor choices in life, some of those can lead to a very tough addiction, and addiction can lead to poor health outcomes that are incredibly hard to resolve despite wanting to make changes for the better. A little more empathy could serve you well.
If you can't control yourself and be responsible, you shouldn't be in the military let alone manning a submarine.
If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit. All humans make poor choices, and for all sorts of reasons. Smoking is just one example that many people - yourself included - seem quick to condemn without understanding.
Adults are not children, much less military personnel. Smoking is a choice and you are responsible for your choices. "It's an addiction." is a lazy, irresponsible excuse and escape.
Quoting the context from a few replies ago:
> You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.
Being asked to quit an addiction on demand is completely different, you don't "merely choose" to smoke every day. That's what makes it so difficult to escape addiction, it's not merely a choice like what you're going to have for lunch. Once you're addicted, your body psychologically and physically compels you to do it.
Would you say that giving up your passwords under the threat of being beaten with a $5 wrench is merely a choice? Addiction is like that, but it's your brain holding the $5 wrench.
What next, are you going to obligate the military to provide all the alcohol and hard drugs any addict may desire in the next 6 months?
There's so many reasons you get disqualified from serving in certain positions in military. Being addicted is just one of them.
smokers are not victims of circumstance.
Addiction subverts free will.
Smoking is no less a serious form of addiction than any other you can imagine, the only difference is the consequence to other people is curtailed in comparison.
Agree to disagree as much as you want: you come across as plain ignorant in the eyes of anybody who understands the issue.
While smoking is a choice, not all choices are the same. Not all choices are weighted by a chemical addiction, comparing quitting smoking to bad food or exercise choices trivialises it in an unnecessary way.
Breaking an addiction is difficult, but smoking is one of the hardest addictions to break. I would imagine that heroin is more difficult to quit, but I can't think of any other addictions that are as difficult to break as nicotine.
If you have no experience of this (and it seems that you do not so apologies if you do) then a simple way to understand how difficult it is quit is not to think of it as a single choice to make. Imagine making the most difficult choice of your life, against everything that your body and brain is telling you - something that requires an extraordinary act of will and self-faith. The reward for making the correct choice is not an end to the matter - it will push it to one side for about 15-20 seconds. Then another wave of chemical addiction will wash over you, everything in your life will pale into insignificance and you will be faced with exactly the same choice again. This will repeat without end, asleep or awake, until you break the first part of the addiction. It will only take two or three weeks of these constant life changing choices, and you must make the correct choice every single time, but it will feel like an eternity.
If you make it through that initial period then it gets easier, but that sequence of life-changing choices won't really end for about six months, although you will gain more confidence that you are making the right choice through that time.
Several years later you will reach a point where you no longer have to choose and you have genuinely become a non-smoker. It is a long difficult road, but it is possible and many people do it. Believing that is almost impossible while you are still addicted, and find that believe that you personally are mentally strong enough to endure that cycle of choice and longing is the most difficult step of all.
So, yes it is a choice - but that does not make it the same as other things that are a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others, and to put all choices into a single category and assume they are the same is to under-estimate the range of difficulty that exists across different choices.
Many people who manage to lose weight end up relapsing. Most people end up gaining all the weight back. [1]
It’s far higher than the relapse rate amongst former smokers. And really, just look at exploding obesity rates around the world.
Yes, smoking is a choice. Yes, people will mock smokers for crying and saying it’s not their fault. Yes, admitting personal responsibility and making personal effort is the best way to overcome it. Smoking is addictive, but so is loads of stuff. It sucks, but most people get through life choosing to never start.
When I was a kid I knew I would drink, from about the age of 8. I don't know why, I just knew - although I didn't start till I was around 13. I never thought I would smoke, even though most of the adults I knew did smoke. As for why I started - I was at a party, around 14 years old, and the host's parents locked the booze away - so I thought "I'll do this instead".
In my experience (and I'm no expert and I'd never want to put words into anyone else's mouth), addiction is a mixture of different factors. There's why you started in the first place, there's a psychological need that is going unfulfilled, there's habit and there's actual physical addiction.
For me:
LSD - not a problem. I had a great night out, thought "that will never be bettered" so never took it again.
MDMA/Ecstasy - again, not a problem. It was entirely situational - go out clubbing, take some pills - and when I stopped clubbing I stopped taking it.
Cannabis - I smoked weed constantly for around 10 years, often rolling one up last thing at night so it was the first thing I did in the morning. I stopped when I actually had to start working for a living and I couldn't afford the lack of time it caused. So I would say it was basically habit and boredom that kept me at it.
Drinking - I used to drink heavily, daily, for many many years. I was never a "hide the vodka in the toilet cistern" type, I just would go out and have a drink and not stop till I fell asleep. Eventually a combination of health issues and being fed up with wondering if I'd made a fool of myself last night made me try to stop. And it was HARD. I never had serious physical symptoms, but alcohol is everywhere. It's changed a bit now, but buying soft drinks when out was frowned upon and so many of my routines involved it. I stopped with the help of reddit (r/stopdrinking is the most wonderful place on earth full of kind and supportive people) and lots of fizzy drinks and ice cream (and yes, I put on weight, but I figured one issue at a time, and now I've lost that weight and am much healthier all round). Definitely habit, social/psychological and physical.
Cocaine - 2 spells using cocaine heavily. Once I used to use it to get me out of bed in the morning, but it was easy to stop. Second time I used it every day for around 18 months. I think this was because I was in a bad way mentally and I just needed to silence the noise in my head. It's actually very difficult to take cocaine like that - it doesn't last long, it hurts, your nose is constantly blocked and it's a pain to prepare. For me, psychological void.
Nicotine - the hardest of the lot to stop. Sort of. I read the Allen Carr book and stopped smoking 20 per day almost immediately. But I just couldn't stop smoking when I went out - it was intrinsically linked with "having a good time" (see why I started). Like cocaine, it's short-lived, but it's so easy to "top up" again, so you gain a series of little "boosts" throughout the day. Of course, you need the boosts because your brain stops functioning as it wears off. So it builds habits and has a physical effect. In the end I got hypnotised which helped me stop when going out - but I still often ask friends if I can hold their cigarettes, just so I've got something in my fingers. This is a mix of all of the factors combined.
Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.
I would say in none of the cases were "effort" and "willpower" part of what made me stop - I had to figure out why it was happening and deal with the underlying causes.
I don’t have notable experience with addictive-type substances other than caffeine, but I can chime in there - I went cold-turkey from drinking 4-5 cups of coffee per day, and I was pretty surprised by how awful I felt the first day. Two days later I felt perfectly fine without caffeine.
Now I drink one cup per day, only before noon, often decaf. If I skip a day, I don’t notice any effect.
So it probably varies a lot based on the person.
We don't trust kids with making contracts/permanent choices for good reasons. And it is easy to get roped into smoking to fit in as a kid. So, I disagree on it being a choice in all situations.
My mother started at 11. It's actually very typical for a smoker to start around that young. Many drug addicts are first exposed to the drug before their minds are anywhere nearly developed. They never had a chance to make anything like an informed adult choice. It's one of the saddest aspects of it.
I wonder why that is, I wouldn't think I have a super strong will or just cannot be addicted, if I consider gaming or other procrastination habits..
But what definitely please shouldn't be done here is to put it into a category of "the most addictive thing" where really just heroine, true aclohol addiction, and similar drugs belong. Heroine/alcohol is nearly impossible to fight through with just own willpower. Objectively!
The key is to avoid situations that trigger your addiction. Don’t buy any of the products. Don’t hang around people that use them. Don’t go to places where people use them. And so on. This might mean you need to get new friends. It’s unfortunately the way it is.
That’s why it’s harder to quit more ubiquitous things (like eating sugar). And it probably varies from person to person
Now, perhaps, imagine for one second, your experience is not like other people's.
Objectively, based on actual studies, smoking is incredibly hard to quit.
Please don't try and undermine that because you sit at the edge of the distribution curve. I'm glad that you do, but you are an outlier, and don't get to condemn all the other evidence on the basis of that.
But even then, different people have different responses to addiction and some people find it easier than others.
Willpower is not evenly distributed across the population. Resilience to uncomfortable situations is a muscle that has to be trained, and you need that before you can tackle addiction, and keep working on it.
I'm pleased for your father, but your roommates are not the same person, and comparing them as if they are entirely equivalent is unfair to them AND your father. Your father had experience, willpower and resilience that your roommates do not yet have, and that's not their fault.
When/if you encounter addiction writ large - drugs, alcohol, gambling - the stuff that gets real crazy real quick, you might see the problem and the difficulties associated it, and the nuance of an addiction that gets at somebody that does not have immediate consequences but delayed consequences. You might then get why your father did very well, and your roommates are relatively blameless in this regard.
At that point, they quit literally overnight and never went back. And I'm using "literally" literally here.
So yes, I know it's hard, but I'm pretty sure people who don't manage to quit just don't want to quit hard enough. They "want" to in the same sense that I want to learn martial arts: I've always thought that it would be great to master a martial art, and sometimes fantasize with it, but I know fully well that I'm never going to do it because I'm not willing to do what it takes (the time, the discipline, receiving blows, etc.)
In other words, I don't think wanting to snap a finger and magically never feel like smoking anymore qualifies as wanting to quit smoking.
When I vaped for a little while like five years ago to see if it’d help concentration I wouldn’t crave it exactly, more like if I had it I’d just pull it out absentmindedly and puff on it until it was empty.
Anyway my working theory is when you start has a lot to do with getting addicted.
I think any addiction is hard to walk away from once it's had you for a while, it's why addiction support groups exist. Alcohol, gambling and drugs can cause real chaos in the very short term whereas smoking can take years to cause serious damage, so people reduce it in terms of impact, but it's no different to any other form of addiction in terms of its difficulty to get away from.
So when people act flippantly towards it, I realise they've had the good fortune of never having to deal with addiction in their lives. Good for them, but I really wish people had an ounce of common human empathy in them when talking about this. It's tough, and they clearly don't understand that.
Besides allowing me to socialize more easily, it’s an incredibly potent stress reliever which allowed me to deal with sensory overload and other stressors (I’m autistic). Nothing comes even close to how quickly it can defuse stressful situations.
The fact that something nudges you to take a break and a few steps every hour is also something I miss tremendously. I always joked that I was the in-house bug hunter and hard problem solver because I’d walk the stairs every hour and would solve the problem on the way back up.
Now that I’ve quit, many things in my life have become much harder. I need to be conscious of my stress level at all times and plan for mitigation through cardio, ear protection, fixed schedules. A 1h run achieves the same result as a 2 minute cigarette break would, and I have to set an alarm to remind me to take breaks. Because of Covid and consequent work from home, this has all become manageable, but I don’t think I could function in normal society very well without picking smoking back up.
Did you mean to reply to another comment?
Just like a nonsmoker, smokers are just fine being forced to go without cigarettes while underway. My husband was both a smoker and a submariner at the same time for many years. He couldn't stand vaping or using dip so he was just was forced to go without nicotine for the duration of the underway. Of course he (and the other smokers) were really grumpy about it, but that's it.
I also have smoker relatives who were somewhat frequently hospitalized. You simply can't smoke in a hospital, tough cookies if you want a cigarette. You simply just deal with going without - you can be prescribed nicotine patches is all, which aren't helpful to my family members.
We are talking about people getting annoyed they can't smoke.
Is 'smoker' a permanent status, like some people consider themselves alcoholics even when they haven't drunk alcohol in a decade? If so, you could have a submarine full of smokers very easily!
But if you're only a smoker if you've had at least 1 cigarette in the past week, your submarine would have no smokers after seven days at sea.
Incidentally, that's precisely what helped me quit (a long time ago): I realized I was a slave to the cigarette and the only way to be free again was to stop it altogether. It was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. I stayed in bed for four days trying to think about something else and sleeping it through. And then it wasn't over for a couple of weeks.
At some point I read the Alan Carr book. I was skeptical but hey, might as well try it, right? Around that time my wife and I were also thinking about kids and I really wanted to quit before she was pregnant. I finished the book, smoked my last cigarette, went to bed, and lasted about 6 hours after waking up before I was back at it again. That night I re-read the last bit of the book, smoked my last cigarette (again) and went to bed.
I haven't touched a cigarette since and it's been very easy. not a single pang or hankering or anything. I can get drunk without wanting a cig. People can smoke around me and I don't care. I'm not an ex-smoker. I'm a non-smoker. Looking back (4 years now) I find it hard to understand myself why I had so much trouble quitting. It's been soooo easy.
But only after I really wanted it for me.
The addict self-identification is also the reason why people get so defensive about it. People tell them to quit and they treat it like an attack, an injury against their identity, and this cognitive dissonance protects the addiction from being resolved.
> Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.
Some people are legitimately addicted. I know for a fact that I am not (I can go for a month without smoking and I won't go crazy) but removing smoking or nicotine will be a major quality of life downgrade for me.
What you’re suggesting is that smokers be given special accommodation by having their own room for smoking. Furthermore, they would need to be provided with special equipment to filter the air to remove all of the smoke produced by their smoking, otherwise it would spread throughout the other compartments as soon as they open the door to leave the smoking room.
Is any of this reasonable? I don’t think it is. The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches.
Fair enough.
And some people aren't fit to serve on submarines.