You didn’t. As a child you got sick a lot with respiratory illnesses and ear infections, and you went to school reeking of cigs. But you didn’t realize it because you were surrounded by it. The quality of what you ate was often not as good either, because your parents couldn’t taste their food. And we’re probably still dealing with the long term health effects without knowing it.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
The epigenetic effects of this sort of damage take a couple generations to clear up. Gen alpha is probably the first one to widely grow up without these being a problem.
I was so thankful my grandparents’ house was sold to be torn down and rebuilt. There was zero chance that the house with windows NEVER open for 50+ years could have been cleaned or deoderized.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
I recently bought my house. I thought it was an odd choice for the walls to be done in a pale yellow color, It was only when I started redecorating that I realized it was actually white paint. It also explains why all the rooms in the house have the same carpet, their estate agent probably made them change the carpet when they sold the house because it’s brand new, and the cheapest option.
You grew up in it and didn’t notice.
But after the bans the first thing that stood out is you don’t need to bleach every piece of fabric you took outside every day. The first time I went out, woke up the next day and my clothes didn’t smell… you know, smoky I was very confused. Up until that point I assumed that was just what happened to dirty clothes, I didn’t realize it was all the cigarettes.
one of the first times I noticed was when it was banned on flights
There’s a local bowling alley I went to as a kid. I didn’t go back until 2-3 years after the indoor cigarette ban. Once I went in I immediately said “Something’s different…”
Then someone said there’s no more smoke, that was my Aha! moment.
My wife tells me that when she used to go clubbing she would come home with burn marks/holes in her dresses all the time.
Got one on my brand new t-shirt I had bought with my student loan money… That was fucking annoying.
Being a non-smoker back then was a giant pain-in-the-ass at any workplace too because any smoker could and would take a break for a cigarette once an hour and then so would the manager and they’d get to be buddies but if you were known as a non-smoker you didn’t get a break because you “didn’t need one” I knew dozens of people, especially in healthcare, who took up smoking because that was the time to be social with each other and the managers.
The hospital I worked at caught a LOT of flak when they started making people clock in and out for smoke breaks in the early 2000s. The smokers complained they only took a couple breaks a day for only a few minutes. Within the first month they found out people spent over half their days on smoke breaks.
Lul that happens in my office but it’s small and they either all know each other or are related. I take desk breaks and because I’m the unofficial office IT nobody says anything. Someone tried once, Im magically never available to help them with IT stuff. Word spreads around this office. Even the owner of the company an office over doesn’t say anything if he sees me on my phone at my desk. I know my worth, they know my worth.
Smokers getting better chances at promotion because they smoked with the bosses was standard when I started working.
Yeah, maybe we worked at the same place!
When I quit smoking I refused to quit my breaks. It was just a shop, so it was a solo break, I would take a stick of incense and sit outside while it burned for five minutes. This was pre-smartphone and it was really peaceful.
This was an issue in the military too. The smokers would take their smoking breaks. So I started taking non-smoker breaks. lol
My husband tried to take an “apple break” when he was in the air force and his boss laughed at him. He just took up smoking again after that so that he could take the break.
Wow. Dozens of people started smoking to be outside with the smokers? That’s crazy. That must have been during the denial phase in smoking’s history.
It still happens. Many jobs allow smokers an hourly or more frequent break, but expect non smokers to keep at it. The result is many people starting just to get the same break they should give everyone.
Dozens of the people I’ve known personally and most of this was in the 90s and early 2000s. I was part of the “smoke free” class of 2000 and the anti-smoking education started in Kindergarten for us. Imagine dozens of 5 year olds crying as their teachers explained with songs and videos how the adults in our lives were all going to die horrible deaths and it was up to us kids to educate them and help them quit. In school, at least twice a year. Yet by the time we reached the workforce, smoking was still a big part of the working culture and I watched pretty much everyone I knew with a full time job take up smoking at one point or another.
Growing up in the 1960s, my father was a chainsmoker. I never noticed. It was the water that little fish me swam in.
He quit when I was, I dunno, maybe 12 or 13. Suddenly, I noticed tobacco smoke when I encountered it, and it was revolting. I deeply resented having to work in an office in the 1980s that allowed smoking. I deeply resented restaurants with “smoking sections” that were just a half-wall separating me and smokers. I hated flying, with the stench from the “smoking section” filling my air.
How did I survive? Resentfully.
Ask my asthma. I dunno if there’s direct causation but being exposed to cigarette smoke from infancy damn sure didn’t help.
Same dude. I don’t know about you but I also had sinus and ear infections out the ass growing up, which I don’t know for sure was related but it sure seems like it would be.
Absolutely. I was constantly sick. Eventually had tubes placed in my ears and apparently I almost died on the operating table during my tonsillectomy. Fun times!
My sister and I were wee little ones who one week brought home scads of stuff given to us by our school from the American Cancer society. We went running up to our dad screaming “We don’t want you to die daddy!” with all that childish exuberance, and he quit cold turkey the next day.
There’s something very wholesome about the thing you asked of him that you thought was simple (“just stop”) and the mountain he moved to give you want you asked for.
You should BOTH be very proud that he did that. Quitting smoking can be very difficult.
I think one thing a lot of people don’t know now is that back then there was a WHOLE LOT of denial about the detrimental effects of smoking. I think this was mostly the tobacco industry’s propaganda, but it worked. I remember talking with someone in the 90s that had some sort of cancer and had been a smoker most of his life. “No way to know if it was the cigarettes” that caused the cancer, he told me.
We are much, much more aware of the downsides of smoking now. The cat is out of the bag.
Your logic is why I give people in generations before me a bit of a pass. I’m born in '87 and I was alive to remember smoking in cars and restaurants at least, and so if you’re older than me, you may have been told it was okay. But if you’re my age or younger, we have had it slammed into our heads since youth that smoking kills, and so when I see you smoking a cigarette it just hits a little different than our older counterparts.
I appreciate your reasoned approach.
One of the ingredients is how bloody emotional of an addiction it is. You feel personally challenged if somebody berates your behavior. I know, in a quite rational human being, but I’d feel troubled by posts and papers on the downsides of the addiction.
When you stop you stay to see and smell it too. I want to think it stinks, but somehow somewhere it does still smell nice. I know for a fact that even though I’m through all this, is fall for it again immediately.
It’s such a deep seated thing, if you never had addiction it’s hard to grasp.
You are talking to the survivors.
I grew up in a small town, and when I was 17, I signed up for the volunteer fire department in town. Part of the in-processing was getting a chest x-ray so they knew how fucked your lungs were before any exposure related to the position. Nurse asked me how much I smoked and thought I was lying when I (truthfully) said I didn’t. She said my lungs looked like I’d been smoking at least a pack a day for at least a year.
My mom and every step-dad smoked like chimneys, spent a lot of my childhood in bars when smoking indoors was still legal. I don’t know if the nurse was exaggerating the results, and I don’t have a copy of the x-ray from back then. I also picked up the habit myself around 20 in the military and smoked a pack to 2 a day until we found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We both quit cold turkey that day. I assume I’ll have lung or skin cancer at some point between all that childhood exposure, the damage I did to myself smoking for a decade, the aircraft fumes, and burn pit exposure from the military…and we didn’t worry about sunscreen like we should have in the 80s/90s either.
Trent Crimm, The Independent. I have a question, how many step dads did you had?
It really sucked when people could smoke anywhere. I remember so many times when I was at a restaurant just starting into a nice meal and suddenly all I could smell or taste was cigarette (or cigar) smoke. It was gross.
I also remember when airlines had a smoking section, which was usually the back several rows. I remember asking for a seat in the non-smoking section, and the one I got was one row in front of the smoking section; there was probably more smoke there than in the last row of the smoking section.
You washed your clothes a lot. And even worse for girls with long hair.
You would skip restaurants during busy times.
Sometimes you would carry an extra jacket in your car trunk to put on when going into a smokey place, so you could take it off and hopefully not have too much smoke smell on you if you weren’t going to shower soon.
My family smoked like chimneys. I closed myself in my bedroom and avoided un-necessary contact.
Great grandmother got emphysema and died.
Great grandfather got throat cancer, a tracheotomy, and died.
Grandfather got lung cancer and died.
Mom got cancer and survived.
Dad had a massive heart attack and died.My parents only smoked when they had company at home and it was still so dusgusting. Not the smoke itself necessarily, but the morning after when the whole house smelled like old ashtray.
I had a neighbour growing up who would smoke like a crazy person. Her house was quite literally yellow on the insinde. Surprisingly she lived to be almost 70.There are some that manage to make it a long life with what most would have issues with (I.e. a lifetime of smoking.) A good friend died recently and he made it to what I would consider a long life. Was able to retire and stay active for years. Got diagnosed with cancer, two weeks later dead after the first chemo therapy. I’m very happy he didn’t live a much longer life - the pain that would have put him in would have been unbearable, and given how quickly he passed in guessing the cancer was fairly advanced…
Man, it was rough.
At family friends you’d take a break to get some fresh air or a bathroom break, as they smoked indoors and you had to be nice.
At restaurants I would push my parents for non smoking. One time they skipped that option and it impacted me so much I threw up all over the back seat.
They no longer opted for the smoking section ever again.
Man smoking in restaurants was wild in hindsight. It was always disgusting but it was normalised. The thing that always bothered me the most was that when i was out with my family as a child was that we were like 12 people and one guy smoked, we usually sat in the smoking section. That was also the case when i was older, that one or two smokers out of 10 people were always the cranky removed.
Or sitting in a restaurant where the non smoking tavle was next to the smoking table. So you would sit back to back to a guy who was smoking while wou were eating. Wild times, glad that shit is overYou are totally right, it’s crazy to think back to it. I was that 12 year old once or twice.
Even more screwed up was there were smoking sections with walls or without. Without… well, it’s smoke. So it’s going into the non smoking section. With walls? It was like an aquarium.
It’s still a thing in most of the world.
I’d probably say “in much of the world” unless you want to take the time to prove your claim.
You can say as you wish, the limitation on smoking is a first world concept.
This is completely incorrect. In fact when I studied Spanish in college, one assignment had us reading about an anti smoking campaign in Argentina from the early 2000s.
Okay? There was one here in Southeast Asia, yet everyone still smokes indoors. Some assignment you did in a language class about a campaign in a country you haven’t visited is irrelevant.
I then moved to Argentina, so there’s that…
God only knows how. Any time I went somewhere with my parents the car windows were up, the aircon was off and they were both chain smoking.
They both died of smoking-related illnesses.
A lot of people didn’t.
