In this article I don’t want to deal with the health risks. Not because they aren’t important, but simply because they have been pretty much beaten to death. Anybody who smokes is aware of the dangers to health that are attached to the smoking habit. If you are still smoking you simply don’t believe it will happen to you, or you think it won’t happen for a long time. Nothing to be done there in either case.
Instead, I want to focus on two other aspects of smoking that get less press than the health concerns, ie
Finances
Cleanliness
Finances
The financial cost of smoking matters a lot unless you are one of the top wage-earners in society. Today, in the great Province of British Columbia, a package of name-brand smokes like Players or Export will set you back about ten bucks. If you have a pack-a-day habit you’re burning up at least $300 a month.
I’m a smoker, but I have this little part of me that watches in amazement when I fork over that money and just shakes his head. If someone grabbed me, stuck my feet in a fire and said I had to come up with a way to save three hundred dollars a month, I’d say they were out of their minds. Somehow, there’s never money to save, but there’s always money for vices.
The things that sink us financially aren’t the big, occasional expenses. What really matters are the recurring monthly expenses that chew up our pay over and over again. One counselor I spoke to told me that smoking would kill an average wage-earner financially. Its like running a race with a rock tied to one leg.
Cleanliness
I’m talking here about keeping your house clean and pleasant. The one thing we’ve managed to do this year is move the smoking outside, and that has made all the difference to how pleasant our home is. One room that is really effected by smoking is the bathroom. The humidity seems to secrete the tar out of the smoke and deposit it on the walls and ceiling. There’s nothing quite like big drops of tar hanging over your head, or the brown streaks running down the walls. They are truly disgusting!
The other location that is really hard to keep pleasant if you smoke is your car. The ashtray stinks. There’s a fine dusting of ash over everything. The stink gets right into the floor mats and upholstery and it takes months to clean up. Getting into a smoker’s car on a road trip is like curling up in an ashtray.
So, there you go. Those two factors, to me, are the biggest reasons to stop smoking right now. They may not truly be dangers of smoking in the physical sense, but they are still great reasons to butt out. Maybe one of them will be more important to you than the risks to your health.
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