Why does someone start smoking? Why someone should chose a lifetime of addiction, of health issues, lack of freedom and impossibility to take life changing decisions?

The fact is that nobody ever told us these things when we started smoking. When you’re young, you never think further than the tip of your nose, and that applies to smoking cigarettes better than to anything else. Chances are you started smoking because you wanted to look older, or perhaps because you wanted to look cool and be part of the ‘in’ crowd. Maybe you began smoking cigarettes because everyone else around you was, and it just seemed like a natural thing to do.

Whatever the reason, as you grow older, you must realize that all those reasons for smoking cigarettes are nothing but smoke and mirrors – sometimes literally! If you thought it would make you look older, well it does: smoking ages you prematurely, hello leathery skin!

But the main reason to start smoking cigarettes, in almost all cases, is out of a need for acceptance. The thing is that as you get older, your wiser friends quit, and as society in general wakes up to the dangers inherent to smoking and inhaling second-hand smoke, smoking cigarettes becomes banned in more and more public places.

Smoking is just not as cool as it was, and nowadays and in many parts of the world, smoking cigarettes makes you a complete social pariah. In the last days of my smoking, I could go to parties with 20 or more people and be the only one there with this deadly addiction! Instead of being a tool of inclusion, smoking has become a marginal and lonely thing, smokers hiding out together like prey.

Whatever social reasoning was behind your decision, or lack thereof, to start smoking, it has surely disappeared by now, as friends, family and acquaintances decide to kick the smelly and deadly habit of smoking cigarettes. Stop being a social pariah and join the ranks of healthy, non-addicted non-smokers!