MARK ALEXANDER: There is something exceedingly attractive about seeing a handsome man smoking a cigarette. Real cigarettes, not those damn stupid, dummy-like contraptions they call e-cigarettes. There is absolutely nothing attractive about seeing somebody vaping. E-cigarettes and vaping are for the birds. Real men smoke, not vape!
Of course it is far healthier not to smoke, ceteris paribus, all things being equal. However, in life, all things are rarely, if ever, equal. Change one thing about your lifestyle and just about everything else changes with that change. This is why young people today are often not healthier than young people of yesteryear were. Young people used to smoke and drink. These days, many young people are far too goody-goody to do that. They are risk-averse. But they are rarely much healthier, because they screw up their health in other ways instead — by injecting copious quantities of ink beneath their skin; eating junk food; taking steroids and all manner of other muscle-enhancing substances for their six-packs.
It is hard for me to think of any activity more boring than spending hours and hours in a gym! Young people are welcome to that!
When I was a young man, just about all my friends enjoyed a smoke and a drink. The ones that didn’t were thought to be a little odd! 😊 Funny thing is that none of them ended up with cancer prematurely because they were smokers. These days, however, many young people, in spite of their so-called healthy lifestyles do end up suffering from that awful disease. Sadly. They also often end up with type-2 diabetes because of all the junk food that they consume. So, I do not observe many young people being very much healthier today than they were in my generation. Nor do they appear to be any happier. My generation had lots of fun to boot! We didn’t exhaust ourselves in gyms. We smoked and sometimes got tipsy instead! 😊
I write this about smoking but, as I have said before, I am no longer a smoker. I haven’t smoked a cigarette for exactly four and a quarter years. I still love to see someone enjoying a smoke though. Especially a very handsome man. (Sorry ladies! 😊)
In my family, smoking was generally considered a man’s pursuit. I can think of few ladies in my family that were smokers. Maybe only one. Yet most of the men did smoke at one time or another.
These days, however, I come into contact with almost nobody who smokes. As a result, I can’t remember the day I was in the company of a smoker. It’s so boring! I’d love to smell the smoke emanating from someone’s burning cigarette. It would remind me of old times.
I have this theory that when people smoked, they were nicer and kinder to one another. To me, being a non-smoker is no badge of honour. All the nasty buggers in the world that I can think of are, or have been, non-smokers: Hitler, Trump, Putin. To name just three. There are plenty more, but I shall be diplomatic and refrain from mentioning them by name. They, however, know who they are.
When I was growing up, most of the adults smoked. But most of then were also very welcoming when you visited them. These days, nobody smokes but nobody entertains others either. Each person is out for himself. So, they may not be smokers, but they are not any more welcoming, either.
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