Nicotine is an addiction that has been profoundly normalized in our culture. You could plausibly hope to not remind yourself of your addiction to meth at the workplace, but you can’t escape cigarettes. The reminders that you could always grab another smoke aren’t the rare neon of the drug den, they’re toasted and wispy and everywhere.
Philosophy, of course, comes easily to the addict. Part of the philosophizing is nihilistic: you could die at any time, what’s the point if you aren’t living the way you want to, you can always put it off. Some of it is economic: oh, it’s just another one, the difference is marginal, what’s another thirty rupees. Nicotine’s arguments are endless. I’ll tell you what it feels like now as I’m convulsed with withdrawal, trying to study the bankruptcy code while there’s a nagging catch in my throat like I’m about to break down in a flood of tearful grief, watch it slip over the ramparts, break on the rock, and flow down my face. It’s hellish and self-negating, my preferences, and my common sense being shredded by neurotransmitters and their primal longing for stimulation. Nobody wants this.
Aesthetics is also a branch of philosophy, and the aesthetics of the cigarette have terrible beauty. And you could not know it if you haven’t spent many hours in the company of tar and tobacco. You will miss wispy smoke and the way it billows and spreads and diffuses against the dark sky, how the light filters through it and pierces the emptiness where the smoke isn’t. You will miss the weight of the cigarette in your hand, how it looks starkly utilitarian, world war one, architects and engineers and writers staring at canvases and notebooks, marginalia in one hand, your deadly embers in the other.
Even moments of solitude acquire a social relevance. There are few moments in the modern day where one simply exists and takes a moment to ponder existence, to take in aesthetics as a part of the workday. But you inhale, and you exhale, and in the moments between drags, you have philosophical thoughts, and you notice how the wall has a bit of graffiti on it, and how the sun looks against that particularly dark cloud. It provides a place for meeting, a space where you need no introduction: can I borrow your light? Thank you. Now let’s look away into the distance.