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.
I grew up in the 80’s / early 90s when smoking indoors was still common (restaurants, buses, etc). You just kind of got used to it.
Eventually I started smoking, and it was less of a bother 😆 (have since quit).
The thing I never could figure out, even as a smoker, was how people smoked in a car with the windows rolled up. It was unbearable even being the one smoking. Even in the dead of winter and negative one million degrees outside, I always had to have a window cracked.
Same here. My Dad was a smoker and I remember sitting on the top deck of buses with him whilst he smoked. Can’t remember ever noticing the smell really. I started smoking myself at 15. Quit about 10 years later. Now I can smell it so clearly. I can tell if someone is a smoker as soon as I get anywhere near them.
Going on a long car trip in winter as a kid sucked so hard. Parents are in the front seats, you’re in the back. They’re smoking more often than normal because of boredom. You’re freezing your ass off because they’re cracking the window, and the smoke is awful.
I live in a country where there are still bars where you can legally smoke indoors. One of my favourite bars is like that even though I am a non-smoker. I always feel like I can burn all my clothes after an evening there. And the hangovers are way worse.
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.
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.
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.
90’s kid with smoker parents. You made do with the migraines. It was the absolute worst in winter car rides on bright days. Blinding snow plus second hand smoke migraine and no rolling down the window more than a tiny crack. Pure hell.
Yes. Migraines. It wasn’t my parents but an early job in the late 80s. Dude next to me smoked so much it was a problem with fouling the equipment. We had to re-do jobs all the time for failure to clean the settled soot. I left the job and one of the reasons was the constant migraines.
Well at that age I was a baby so I was mostly close to the floor
We bowled a lot
A lot of people didn’t.
You can get a feel of it by being around a lot of fragrances. You know the people who are noseblind so wear a lot of perfume/cologne. They putting on fragrances in their lotions or other stuff. Their house and/or car reeks but they barely notice. Same feel and they don’t even notice the smell, it normal to them. Their kids and pets are getting sick and they don’t care. I forgot to add that you are considering the problem if you bring it up.
Even if it’s not the 70s or 80s, I still grew up with lots of second hand smoke in the 90s. Once a year my village had a little comedy thing (german carnival) for one evening in the local gym. You couldn’t see the stage after the first hour if you were like 10m away from the stage. It didn’t matter, smoking, drinking and just a little music and everybody was happy. And it was the same in every restaurant or subway station. It just felt normal, it smelled the same no matter where you went and everybody smelled like cold smoke. After it got shut down in quiet a rush, the new normal came so quickly, that even today nobody can believe how it was just 20-25 years ago.
Australian guy here
Didn’t go out much and did lots of outdoor activities… When I first started work it was allowed in work vehicles, that stopped after about 2 years.
Stillnallowed in lunch rooms etc.so I ate outside or at my desk. Did not go to restaurants etc becase of the smoking, flew on an Air France flight once from Miami to Paria and it had smoking, no escape, fuck that was bad, still remember it decades later :)
My Dad said it was shocking when he was working (he’s long dead and would have been about 85 if we was still living, he was a non smoker)
So when you were like 8 years old and you went into the bathroom at 2 in the morning and saw your parents’ cigarettes you might try one out and wonder what was wrong with them.
Did this to one of my aunts. Never again, tried weed a couple months ago, also no thanks. Nothing against people who want to smoke weed, I voted to legalize it. I just can’t stand it.
It’s not for everyone–some people have very strong reactions to it, but they may also have strong reactions to alcohol and nicotine. Alternatively, most people get zonked out of their gourd from between many weeks and many months when trying antidepressants or anxiolytics. Weed is probably not different in that regard.
I hit a joint like 4 times. I didn’t really feel any effects, it just felt uncomfortable going in. I also downed a regular orange juice sized tall glass of whisky, took a while to take effect but oh boy did I feel that. I just don’t like not feeling like myself I think. Don’t like feeling under the influence of anything. I avoid meds for that reason too unless they’re necessary.
If you hit a joint 4 times on top of a cup of whisky and didn’t feel it, you didn’t smoke it right. No offense meant, it’s really common for people to not understand how to inhale smoke properly when they start.
Probably fair I tried inhaling with my lungs like I was told but I had no prior experience. I also don’t know how strong or good the weed was, as I understand it that can change how it affects someone, I assumed my girlfriend wouldn’t give me crap stuff. The whisky was way later in the day granted.
Yeah I figured that was the case. I have also not enjoyed feeling like I’ve lost control, which made it hard for me to get on to weed in the first place. I have since learned that it is a great medication for me and makes my life better, but I had to get through a lot of anxiety first. Now I don’t feel it at all.
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.
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!
Both my parents smoked so I didn’t notice it growing up. Once I went to college and got away from that environment I really started to notice it all around me. Nothing was worse than opening up the closet and smelling the smoke on the coat you wore the night before at a bar. Luckily, my county was an early adopter of non-smoking sections and eventually outright banning and that changed everything.
We couldn’t go anywhere. This continued well into the 2000s when I was a kid, and I had (mild) asthma. We only went out to eat when it was warm enough to sit outside, and I only ever went to take your kid to work day once.
Oh, and I remember riding in the back sear of my grandmothers car when she lit up and cracked the window. I stuffed my head under her seat so I could breathe marginally cleaner air until we got wherever we were going.
If you didn’t have asthma, it was just unpleasant and you put up with it. And probably burned your clothes after visiting a nursing home or bar.
