The Moral Equivalent of Smoking
On a day that's not anywhere close to New Year's, I figured I'd go back and review my own resolution from last January and see just how much progress I had made. In doing so, I started thinking about resolutions in general. Very often, people set out to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop eating so much, or eliminate any other number of bad habits. These types of goals tend to be much harder when they involve quitting without the adoption of any kind of replacement behavior.
Take smoking, for example. People smoke cigarettes for a reason. Non-smokers, who have gone their entire lives without ever once trying a cigarette, believe that the reason people start smoking has something to do with stupidity. This is, I think, an oversimplification, and it's at best incomplete. Cigarette smoking fulfills certain mental, physical, psychological, emotional, and most importantly, social needs, of the individual. To look upon this behavior with a rational mindset, and to dismiss those who choose to smoke as simply lacking in intelligence, is completely missing the complexity of the underlying motivation that makes people start smoking...something that even psychologists have a difficult time fully understanding. Refusing to consider the reasons for this kind of behavior is, at best, a wasted opportunity to figure out what really makes people tick.
Smokers, just by virtue of stepping outside of parties and lighting up with one another, immediately belong to a little club of their own. If you step outside of your office where you work and you run into someone else whose smoking, there's an instant common ground between the two of you, a subtle bond that forms almost instantly. I know of no other shared behavior that has even close to the same effect in social situations.
The smoking ban in most states in restaurants and bars doesn't deter this kind of thing from happening; as a matter of fact, it makes it more likely to happen. (That's not to say the bans are bad things.) People have to step outside to light up, and they meet others doing the same thing. The bonding that occurs is even stronger off the beaten path.
William James wrote an essay called "The Moral Equivalent of War", which I had to read in college for reasons I don't remember. His argument was simple: the act of nations going to war with one another and fighting fulfills a certain inborn human need. To get rid of war, you need to replace fighting with something people can do that fulfills that same need.
I remember reading this essay, and it dawned on me that if you want to reduce the amount of smoking that happens, what we need is the moral equivalent of smoking. Like I said, I have yet to find any kind of alternative behavior that's just as readily available to anyone, that brings people together, in a way that encourages them to interact with one another, as much as smoking cigarettes does.
I'm certainly not telling you that you should stop smoking...it's really none of my business what you do. (Sure, it's not good for your health to be inhaling all of that junk into your body, but don't let anyone try and convince you that you if don't smoke, then you won't die.) But the filling of needs is a very real issue. When you quit something, when you resolve to stop some bad behavior, you need to replace it with something that is a functional and psychological equivalent.
You can resolve to go to the gym instead of going to the bar after work; but people don't really talk to each other at gyms very much, and they do at bars. That means, in the absence of any drastic needs for lifestyle change (like a heart attack), this is going to be a tough goal to stick to, even if it is a worthwhile one.
Don't just stop bad habits and sit around waiting for things to improve. Stop, and then start doing something else.
Take smoking, for example. People smoke cigarettes for a reason. Non-smokers, who have gone their entire lives without ever once trying a cigarette, believe that the reason people start smoking has something to do with stupidity. This is, I think, an oversimplification, and it's at best incomplete. Cigarette smoking fulfills certain mental, physical, psychological, emotional, and most importantly, social needs, of the individual. To look upon this behavior with a rational mindset, and to dismiss those who choose to smoke as simply lacking in intelligence, is completely missing the complexity of the underlying motivation that makes people start smoking...something that even psychologists have a difficult time fully understanding. Refusing to consider the reasons for this kind of behavior is, at best, a wasted opportunity to figure out what really makes people tick.
Smokers, just by virtue of stepping outside of parties and lighting up with one another, immediately belong to a little club of their own. If you step outside of your office where you work and you run into someone else whose smoking, there's an instant common ground between the two of you, a subtle bond that forms almost instantly. I know of no other shared behavior that has even close to the same effect in social situations.
The smoking ban in most states in restaurants and bars doesn't deter this kind of thing from happening; as a matter of fact, it makes it more likely to happen. (That's not to say the bans are bad things.) People have to step outside to light up, and they meet others doing the same thing. The bonding that occurs is even stronger off the beaten path.
William James wrote an essay called "The Moral Equivalent of War", which I had to read in college for reasons I don't remember. His argument was simple: the act of nations going to war with one another and fighting fulfills a certain inborn human need. To get rid of war, you need to replace fighting with something people can do that fulfills that same need.
I remember reading this essay, and it dawned on me that if you want to reduce the amount of smoking that happens, what we need is the moral equivalent of smoking. Like I said, I have yet to find any kind of alternative behavior that's just as readily available to anyone, that brings people together, in a way that encourages them to interact with one another, as much as smoking cigarettes does.
I'm certainly not telling you that you should stop smoking...it's really none of my business what you do. (Sure, it's not good for your health to be inhaling all of that junk into your body, but don't let anyone try and convince you that you if don't smoke, then you won't die.) But the filling of needs is a very real issue. When you quit something, when you resolve to stop some bad behavior, you need to replace it with something that is a functional and psychological equivalent.
You can resolve to go to the gym instead of going to the bar after work; but people don't really talk to each other at gyms very much, and they do at bars. That means, in the absence of any drastic needs for lifestyle change (like a heart attack), this is going to be a tough goal to stick to, even if it is a worthwhile one.
Don't just stop bad habits and sit around waiting for things to improve. Stop, and then start doing something else.