Cigarette Karma

Well, I am a smoker. I am not exactly all that proud of smoking, I know I am addicted and should quit. However, I do enjoy being able to sit back or stand around in the garden and have a cigarette. It really does calm me down and give me time to think, even though it does not make problems disappear. Yet it does not need to, just as a means of being able to stand back for a bit, it is useful.

However this is not the main point, it is just an introduction. I have noticed that there are different types of smokers like there are different types of people. You have your casual smokers and hardcore smokers, there are even those “once in a blue moon, really needs a smoke badly before he throttles someone” smokers. There are also different attitudes to handing out cigarettes. I have reduced these down to two fairly wide groups.

I find this interesting. The first group I call the debt-lenders. These are the ones that only give away cigarettes to people they know they can claim back from. They will also definitely claim the cigarettes back. I am not sure if any go so far as keeping a little debtors book with all the names and amounts of cigarettes they have given out, but I would not put it past some of them. I do have a few friends like this. However, at the same time they do not really care too much about giving back “bumbed” cigarettes unless forced to.

The other group I call the ones who believe in cigarette karma. These I think believe that the cigarettes will come back eventually, even if it is not from the same person and therefore hand out cigarettes fairly freely. You do a good turn and something good will come back. I would even go so far as to say that some of these believe in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which basically states that one should act in such a way that they wish their actions to become a universal law. In other words I do not harm others so no one should harm others. In terms of cigarettes this means that one believes that by handing out cigarettes everyone should hand out cigarettes and therefore your cigarettes will always come back.

Yep, I know this post is fairly pointless, but hopefully it will be interesting for some non-smokers. Might even be interesting for smokers though, but I think most smokers have noticed smoking habits already.

Jon