Bring Back Smoking Inside

There is a certain indescribable feeling, of a long past nostalgia that I have never felt when my parents tell stories about walking into the smoke infested CC Club in mid 90’s Uptown, Minneapolis. There is a vivid sensation I can feel when they describe walking in and choking on the stale and carcinogenic fog, waking up the next day and burning your clothes as its the only way to rid them of the foul scent of tobacco.

But of course, I am not here to protest the 2007 Freedom to Breath Act.

I do enjoy a cigarette every once in a while… or in some cases quite frequently. Even still I do not wish that every restaurant I walk into is thick with the stench of Marlboro Golds. Let alone wish that on anyone, adult or child, who does not smoke.

So what is this feeling? This feeling that I cannot even describe, but yet makes me long for a time before a mundane collection of atoms arranged themselves in such a matter to produce this thought via the consciousness I call myself.

It is not, of course, due to my crippling nicotine addiction.

It is, in fact, a longing. It is a longing for a world more real than the present. It is a longing for a sense of connection to my world and my community with less dependence on the superficial appearances and egos we must hold up through the internet. It is a longing for an escape from the increasingly simulated and superficial world that we have no choice but to participate in through the hyper-connectivity of the technological era. It is a longing for a world, I, as a member of Generation Z, I, born in the year 2004, have never and will never get to experience.

In a world where you can experience so much from the comfort of your bedroom. In a world where you can visit the entire planet through a VR headset. In a world where you can play video games with your best friend whom you’ve never even met in person, and lives seven thousand miles away. In a world where you can become famous, make a million dollars, gamble it all away, get cancelled and kill yourself all without leaving your bed, what is the one thing we can no longer simulate?

You cannot simulate connection.

I do not claim to know the answers to life, but there is one thing that through my privileged upbringing as a middle class American raised in Minnesota with two loving parents has taught me. Through all my travels and experiences there is one thing I know for certain. I know that when I’m lying on my deathbed, slipping into the eternal darkness towards the nothingness where we all spent the first 13.8 billion years of the universe, I know for a fact the last thing I will be thinking about is the dollar amount remaining in my bank account. I know for a fact that I will not be reminiscing on the blue Ferrari I would drive to the grocery store. I know I won’t be bashing my head over the four point of stock price I failed to produce for my enslavers.

I will die crying tears of extreme happiness thinking about all the incredible people I met along the way.

I will die with my family by my side and my friends close in my heart.

I will die laughing at the thirty second conversation I had with a mysterious man smoking a cigarette outside of a long forgotten bar in a town whose name I can’t remember.

And I will die happy.

The reason I feel so much nostalgia, melancholy and envy when my parents laugh about their drunken adventures in Irish towns before I existed is my longing for a world with less fixation on benign material goods and superficial status symbols which have a strangle hold on our society and is tightening its grip. It’s my innate human desire for deep and meaningful connection with the world, wether that means staying up ’til 5am with my best friends or hearing the life story of a man on the bus who I will never see again. While the hyper-connectivity of the present has provided me with luxuries and joys people couldn’t fathom even thirty years ago, it has stripped away something fundamental about our human nature, our instinct for true ineffable connection.

This is not an essay about smoking inside, it’s an expression of a desire for something that we have lost. Something that no amount of screens can simulate, but must be found. I feel it is my duty to try lead people down to path to the world I want to live in. But it is your choice if you want to follow it.

Bring back smoking inside.

- M