What If Social Media Is Just the New Cigarettes?

When I was a kid in the 1980s, smoke was everywhere. My parents smoked. Their friends smoked. My gym teacher smoked. McDonald's had ashtrays on the tables. You could light up on buses, in restaurants, at your cousin's birthday party. The smell of the 80s wasn't nylon and hairspray - it was Marlboro and ashtrays.

And, like everyone else, I eventually picked it up. Not because I consciously decided to smoke - nobody really does. One day I grabbed a cigarette from a friend, lit it, hated it, and then for some reason (that reason being nicotine) I lit another. And another. Before I knew it, I was a smoker. A light one, sure - mostly after meals or with coffee - but a smoker all the same.

Then came the shift. Slowly, society started realizing that cigarettes weren't just "a bad habit." They were literally deadly. Not just for smokers, but for everyone around them. Suddenly, smoking was banned indoors. Smokers were pushed to the edges of restaurants, then to the sidewalks, then out of sight altogether. In my personal life, I got married and had my first child. That was the final push I needed. I remembered how awful it felt when my dad hugged me right after smoking. I didn't want my kid to hate my hugs. So I quit.

And it wasn't all that hard, because I was never a heavy smoker.

Why am I telling you this now? Because lately, social media feels exactly the same.

Déjà vu

I don’t know why I got on social media. There was no conscious choice. One day someone sent me a friend request on Facebook. Then I got into Twitter. Then Instagram. Then TikTok. And like that first cigarette, I didn’t even like it at first. But I kept scrolling, kept posting, kept checking. This time it wasn’t nicotine that kept bringing me back - it was dopamine.

At first, it felt harmless, A distraction. A way to fill downtime. But then the distraction started morphing into something uglier. I didn’t just scroll - I kind of obsessed. And instead of making me feel entertained, it started making me feel angry and sad. At some point, I realized the first thing I reached for in the morning wasn’t coffee. It was my phone.

That scared me.

Teaching the algorithm to be “nice”

So I tried to fix it. I started retraining my feed. I only liked dog videos, funny sketches, cooking fails and people building cool stuff. No politics. No screaming hot takes. No news that makes me feel like the world is burning.

And it didn’t work.

Because no matter how hard I tried, the “stuff I don’t want” kept sneaking in. And I used quotes because apparently I do want it. I see an opinion so absurd and infuriating I can’t help but tap the comments just to see if everyone else thinks it’s as ridiculous as I do. That’s engagement. And the algorithm doesn’t care if I’m nodding in agreement or fuming with rage. It just knows I’m hooked. So it gives me more.

That’s when it hit me: Social media feels exactly like an 80s diner - we're all sitting there with a social cigarette in hand, voluntarily poisoning ourselves. Only now, instead of lungs, it’s our moods, our attention spans, and our ability to stay sane.

Second-hand scrolling

Here’s the part that really keeps me up at night.

When I quit smoking, it wasn’t just for me. It was for my kid. I didn’t want my habits staining his childhood the way my dad’s smoking stained mine. But what about social media? I don’t smell like a cigarette when I kiss my kids goodnight. But what if I’m carrying something worse?

If all social media does is make me angry, sad, and perpetually distracted, that “stench” seeps out anyway. Even if I try to shield them, they’ll feel it. Maybe not now, maybe not in ways I even recognize. But they’ll inherit the atmosphere I live in - Like second-hand scrolling - and if that atmosphere is toxic, it doesn’t matter that I quit cigarettes.

Perhaps their generation will look at our social media habits like we look at our parent's smoking habits. They won't hate us for it, they'll just wonder why we did it in the first place when it was so obvious that it's bad.

Ready to quit - again

So here’s where I am: I think I’m ready to quit. Actually, no - I think I’ve already decided to quit. But this time it feels harder. Much harder than cigarettes ever did.

Because smoking was socially phased out. Quitting was supported, even celebrated. But social media? Right now it’s still everywhere, unavoidable, expected. To leave it behind feels like being the nerd in high school, sitting alone on the bleachers, missing out because “the smoke aggravates my asthma.”

And maybe that’s what scares me the most. Not the FOMO, not the lost memes, not even the anger. It’s the idea that one day, we’ll look back on this era of constant scrolling the same way we look back at the smoke-filled diners of the 80s - and wonder what the hell we were thinking.