Humans, like our close relatives, those other great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, and how people hate to hear that, despite our sharing around 97 to 99% of the same genes, love shiny things, love to gallery, to pose, to pretend we are what we are not, in an effort to establish dominance.
One problem with this is our hands and our brains. Hands are awkward things in social situations, and whenever we are not feeling confident or are feeling lonely.
What to do with your hands? Where to put them? In your pocket? As the Irish are glad to do when meeting British royalty? Hang them loosely by your sides? Clasp them together in front? Or behind? Certainly not make a fist.
Awkward things, hands. Beautiful but awkward, unlike feet, ugly but so alert and conscientious.
Then the cigarette came along and took care of that awkwardness. Suddenly, you knew what to do in an awkward social situation, pull out the pack, offer one to everyone around you, you’ve now friends, light up the cigarette of the prettiest girl or the most macho looking man, and relax. You in like Flynn.
Fortunately, cigarettes are going the way of the dodo. In its place comes another addiction, the smartphone, which has replaced the cigarette as an agent against loneliness and “what to do with your hands?”
One of the pleasurable things about smoking was that, with a cigarette in your hand, you were never alone. Today it’s a smartphone.
Years ago, if you did not have someone to talk to, if you did not have a book to read, you could light up, sit down and have a smoke. It was comforting. Now you have the smartphone.
Smoking permitted you to be alone socially. If you were at a party, by yourself, waiting for friends to appear or feeling shy, you could find a corner, lean up against the wall, light up and look good with your cigarette, pretending to be John Wayne or Sidney Poitier.
A lighted cigarette, held just so in your hand, made you out to be thoughtful and sexy. As one grew older and your face hardened, a cigar could be even better. It made you seem mature, thoughtful and confident. Pipe smoking has a similar effect but for some reason never caught on in the tropics. I once started smoking a pipe and my dentist recoiled in horror when I opened my mouth. “Pipe or cigar?” he shouted. Cigars are tropical fruits. Bearded Latino-type characters in white linen suits sipping fine rum. Pipes seem made for cold, dark, wintry rooms filled with stuffed armchairs, stuffy waiters and stuffed up old white men with yellowed teeth.
All this was the opposite of reality but appearances matter.
Cigarette brands became like fine brandies or whiskies. The more sophisticated the name, the better you looked and felt. Anchor and Broadway. The sea-going rough sailor. The suave actor from Gone With The Wind. The Marlboro Man, macho like peas on horseback, until he died of lung cancer.
That probably did more to stop smoking than anything else until governments realised they were spending tons of money on caring for people made ill by cigarette smoking and clamped down on the fabulously rich, cigarette companies and their executives who graciously retired to their villas in London and the French Riviera.
But it was the companionship of the cigarette, apart from the dependence, the habit, the addiction it caused, confirmed in the mid-50s but only acknowledged in the 80s, 30 years of studious suppression, brilliant advertising and prevarication by cigarette companies and their paid medical consultants, that was the main reason for its longtime survival.
It was the companionship the cigarette offered. It made people feel good. The lime. The party posing. The after-sex drag. You were not alone. Even if you were. It was all unreal.
The smartphone now has taken over this awkwardness, this loneliness-filling function, this unreality. No one is ever awkward with a smartphone to hand. Even male teenagers, it is said, prefer a smartphone in their hands to traditional devices.
One is never alone, out of touch, unable to reach out and contact another person, to be elsewhere or reading some trite statement by a social influencer or watching a video of someone’s pet dachshund or enjoying an argument between two complete strangers. Living in an unreal world.
The craving to check the smartphone releases the same addictive hormone, dopamine, that gave us smoking pleasure. That lasts for only a few seconds, perhaps minutes. Its fleeting nature makes people look for it again and again.
And unfortunately, like cigarettes, they cause illness, obesity, mental disorders, sleep problems and messed up teenagers. Smartphones are the cigarettes of today.
