Have you noticed smoking is making a comeback? I hate that. I love that. | Opinion
I know smoking is bad for my health. We all know that. So why is it making a comeback?
The sight of snuffed cigarette butts in an ashtray might feel jarringly anachronistic these days, given successful efforts to curtail the smelly act for decades.
Nonetheless, we're edging toward a resurgence, at least in popular culture, of the classic combustion of an old-school cigarette, even if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assures us rates aren’t yet increasing. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen into the quiet resurgence.
I’m a 46-year-old diabetic who tries to be healthy, yet after quitting 20 years ago, I find myself back in the alley occasionally (always shamefully) puffing as I hold pleasure and consequence in the same breath. My friends call it nostalgia. I think it's deeper – a defiant exhale of the angst and authenticity I crave in an uncertain world.
Smoking was eradicated. Now it's creeping back into the mainstream.
The historical canon of smoking is well-documented from early 20th century glamour and association with sophistication, rebellion and artistic freedom – see flappers, film noir, World War II soldiers, the Beat Generation, the Marlboro Man and Bob Dylan.
I grew up in the haze of the 1990s when smoking wasn’t just a habit, it was a personality – raw and rebellious – butts smeared with Courtney Love’s red lipstick, the thrift-store fantasy of "Reality Bites," the sultry detachment of Mia Wallace in "Pulp Fiction."
But smoking fell out of favor over the past several decades, transforming the cigarette from an emblem of cool into a symbol of a bygone era, fraught with undeniable health consequences. Increased spending on public health campaigns successfully shifted public perception in the 1990s and early 2000s as tobacco control media campaigns vilified the act.
In 1998, federal law prohibited paid smoking product placement on TV and in the movies, and subsequent smoking bans made it difficult to light up where secondhand smoke might blow.
Taxes made cigarettes pricey, and in 2007, the Motion Picture Association of America began considering cigarette use as a factor in film ratings.
Meanwhile, I managed to quit smoking while navigating my career and a second marriage, as anti-smoking campaigns gained traction and thankfully weakened tobacco’s power.
Decades later, the old-school act of combusting nicotine is back in the zeitgeist. The New York Times recently reported on the aesthetic resurgence of smoking, and even the Republican Party brought the act back to the U.S. Capitol in 2023.
Eight in 10 of the 2025 Oscar best picture nominees featured tobacco imagery. In the new Netflix show “Too Much,” the character Felix practically begs you to tell him smoking isn’t cool, as he puffs between his nail-polished fingers and we swoon.
Mistrust of institutions and our angst are why smoking is back
This cultural phenomenon unfolds against a backdrop of deep and precipitous institutional distrust in the U.S. government and a decline in trust across various sectors from 2021 to 2024, including pharmacies, hospitals, social service agencies, fire departments, universities, police departments and public health departments.
Concurrent to these visual cues of lighting up, global anti-smoking efforts are quietly being defunded in favor of even bigger world problems. Without dedicated efforts to keep smokers focused on the undeniable health consequences, are we soon to face an even bigger health crisis? Recent legislation will surely compromise health care for 17 million Americans in the near term.
This rebirth points to a deeper longing for control. This stance was well-spun by Kurt Vonnegut when he said, “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
In this chosen ritual, however infrequent, I signal a visceral middle finger to ambient anxieties and constant demands for optimization. I scroll my phone anxiously as I’m bombarded by news that’s not immediately credible, often a polarized take on fleeting democratic norms.
Smoking is terrible for my health. But it helps feed my need to rebel.
Smoking offers a palpable pause, a singular moment of physical presence in an existence mediated by the ever-present pressure of political machinations. And when those threats feel ambient and involuntary, smoking is a sensory language all its own, where the health consequences almost fade to black (like my lungs) as I relish each tantalizing feature of personal agency.
If I asked my therapist why I returned to a pack of Kool 100 Milds as a way to subconsciously control the world’s chaos, she’d likely say it's like thumb sucking, a childish habit that I need to eradicate – immediately.
I can’t disagree. Smoking is awful for my health. Still, the choice to engage with a known threat paradoxically feels safer than the chaos beyond my control, where fundamental freedoms, like the right to bodily autonomy, are increasingly debated and denied. It speaks to my desire for imperfection, a reclaiming of agency over my body, and deliberate choices in defiance of a societal narrative that often conflates moral virtue with absolute health.
For those, like me, who sometimes justify with a “one or two won’t kill me,” it's important to remember all the reasons we quit in the first place. In addition to the risk of lung cancer or worse, I remind myself of the absurdity of Botoxing my forehead wrinkles and injecting Ozempic if I’m willing to suck on a cancer stick.
I put saccharine, bubble-gum flavored vapes and nicotine pouches in this category, too – they’re all really bad for our health. There’s no dispute on that, whether or not we fully demonize smoking.
And maybe the fact that we all know how bad it is is the problem. Smoking is Chapter 1 of the original anti-authority playbook, creeping back into consciousness the minute we look away. Akin to slipping on my classic black leather jacket, it will never truly go out of style. Society, it seems, once again sanctions both as my potent symbols of defiance in a world rife with involuntary consequences.
Andrea Javor is a freelance writer and marketing executive based in Chicago. She spends her free time playing poker and working on her memoir. Connect with her on Instagram: @AndreaEJavor