Smoke and Mirrors

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I had my first cigarette when I was 17. A friend had been at it for a year already, so I was familiar with the rituals and brands. It seemed like a cool thing to my 17-year-old idiot self. After all, SRK smoked, didn’t he?

Once-in-a-while quickly escalated to 5-6 per day. That was all my lungs and wallet could support. Even back then, every day was a study in diminishing returns. The first one in the morning would knock my lights out. My knees would go weak and head would spin. The ones that followed never quite gave that high.

The folks didn’t know, of course. Every cigarette was followed with a mint and rubbing supari on my fingers (Don’t ask – it was logical to my idiot self). This clean up was a 25% added cost, but it probably led to at least one less cigarette per day. Traveling with family was rough. I’d have to make convoluted excuses to sneak out, and double the clean up before returning.

This is hilarious in hindsight because I later found out that my family always knew. Not suspected, knew. How we delude ourselves.

I knew this wasn’t good for me. I could see how much I struggled even to climb up a flight of stairs. One day, I just quit. I’d done this a few times before, but never with this much conviction. I joined a gym, regained my stamina and lung capacity, and stayed on the wagon for a year. But idiot is as idiot does, and I decided to have a celebratory smoke on the one-year anniversary. Just like that, I was hooked again. This time the addiction was worse than ever.

In any waking moment, at least 25% of my brain was plotting the next smoke. Since I was still a closeted smoker, every single one meant a small ride, sneaking into a seedy bylane and keeping an eye out for cops and relatives. So it just made sense to have two instead of one. Cigarette and mint/supari prices had gone up quite a bit too, so there was the double whammy of fuel and cleanup costs.

If I were to plot a graph of number of sticks per day, there was a marked uptick in consumption around two events – increased stress, and increased boredom. By 2015 or so, when I was newly unemployed, the stress and boredom intertwined and the daily number peaked at a twin pack a day. The morning high was a distant memory. Now, smoking was just a way of killing time and maintaining the nicotine levels in my blood. Nicotine crashes were horrifying and greatly increased the already high sense of dread i was permanently nursing.

Then, in 2016, my daughter was born. I quit, cold turkey. The first couple of weeks were rough. I was jonesing all the time, and even threw up once. I had tremors, spiked a temperature and had a total loss of appetite. Thankfully, it went by in a blur of birth certificates and discharge forms and diapers and green poop (my daughter’s).

Two weeks out, the clouds cleared. My sense of taste and smell returned after what seemed like years. Even the most basic food was an explosion of flavor. I could smell mornings. I didn’t even know mornings had a fragrance. I’m quite the hypocrite though- I couldn’t stand the stench of smokers. I could smell them even ten feet away. No wonder my family always knew, despite my comic attempts at subterfuge.

Multiple times, over the next few years, a friend or acquaintance would offer me a smoke which I would politely decline. They would be outraged, telling me how I was the one responsible for getting them hooked, and now I had gotten clean. With one exception, I never cajoled anyone into trying their first smoke. But the fact was that I, a somewhat sensible and reasonably intelligent person, was OK with smoking. That alone made it acceptable for them. The horrible realization dawned on me – I was their SRK (minus the wealth and fame). My decision to chain smoke signaled to my peers that it was perfectly fine, maybe even cool to do so.

I’ve tried to be a lot more mindful of my habits since. You never know who you’re influencing.

It’s been nearly 8 years. Have I been clean since? For the most part, yes. If I do fall off the wagon it’s never been for more than a night. Of late, even the smell makes me nauseous. But that does not mean I can stop being vigilant. I wouldn’t want to repeat my anniversary mistake. Besides, this whole journey taught me that nicotine is just one form of addiction, even if it is the worst.

My watchlist extends to sugar. I cannot have an unfinished pack of Mentos or Tic Tacs in my pocket. I find it best to just stay away. It’s the same with binge watching web shows. Unfortunately, I’m not wired to partake in just a little of anything. It’s either all in, or stay the fuck away.

Knowing that I’m addiction prone is helpful. The pattern is all too familiar, even if the underlying substance changes. I know the highs and the crashes, how long my mind goes into withdrawal, and how it affects my personality. Having an empathetic yet vigilant partner was literally life-saving for me. My wife helped me understand these patterns that I could not see, because I was too close to the action.

Fast forward a year, and we introduced my daughter to the internet. Specifically, educational content created just for her and her peers. The Cocomelon channel had nursery rhymes with well-made animations and excellent production design. It was free to stream on YouTube. And there were hundreds of videos. She would recite some of the rhymes and we marveled at how quickly kids learn.

There was something off about the videos though. I’m speaking with the benefit of hindsight, of course, but the pattern was so obvious. Every video is unnaturally vivid. Every three seconds, an attention-grabbing event happens – sound, movement or color. My daughter would go into a trance while watching, and wouldn’t even notice if she was watching the same video over and over.

She would refuse to eat unless her rhymes were streaming. And once they were playing, you could feed her anything in any quantity and with any taste, good or bad. It didn’t matter. We tried setting boundaries. This didn’t go down too well. She would be sullen and throw tantrums. There would be violent mood swings.

Ooh boy. We knew this pattern.

We cut her off, and the next two weeks were horrible. She lost weight, we lost sleep and my parents lost faith. And just like that, around day 15, she was her old self again. Kind, thoughtful, energetic and talkative. We realized, though, that I had passed on my predispositions, and a lifetime of vigil lay ahead for all of us, especially her.¹

The next time you go to a restaurant, look around. All the kids will be glued to screens. The younger ones on Cocomelon or one of its clones. The older ones on short form video apps.

The second one really freaked me out. With short form video apps, the UI is designed to keep the user hooked.² They skip videos unless something grabs their attention in the first second. The creators know this, so every video has a “hook” right at the start. In one meal, I’ve seen a ten-year-old watch hundreds of short videos. She would skip some videos before it could even register in my mind.

Worryingly, their attention span gets shot too. I had to ease my daughter into reading again. She would get restless with the languid pace of story books. No overstimulation, no fizz-bang-pop every few seconds. It was fascinating, horrifying and like looking in the mirror.

Have we completely stopped her streaming consumption? I don’t think that’s possible, or fair. We’re in the golden age of TV, and she has the right to participate and learn. We’re a lot more mindful of what she consumes. YouTube is an absolute no. Disney+, we’ve found to be a mixed bag. There are good shows, particularly the older IP. Bluey is fantastic. Apple TV+ has been a standout. Their kids’ content is consistently educational, relaxed and empathetic. We love shows like Stillwater and El Deafo. That second one is an adaptation of a graphic novel about the childhood of a hearing-impaired person. I think a good test is whether it is an engaging watch for us too. That works out well because we try to co-watch as much as possible.

Here’s an excellent post on the subject. Its horrifying, especially this excerpt from a New York Times article, on Cocomelon’s research process:

Once a month, children are brought to [a London studio], one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out.

For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.

It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

“It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”

I don’t think we can realistically shelter our kids from these temptations forever. If anything, that might cause a more severe spiral when they are finally out of our clutches. I also know the kids don’t stand a chance against the tech, tobacco or alcohol industries, unless we are more aware, and can educate them about the neurology of addiction. Vapes, porn, and god knows what else lies ahead. If we don’t prepare in advance, we’ll probably overreact when the time comes, alienating and isolating them just when they’ll need us the most.

I wish I was ending on a happier note. If you have any resources that you’ve found helpful, please share them in the comments.

1. I’ve never rewatched Breaking Bad, because I don’t think I’d make it past the Jesse and Jane track of addicts spiraling together, much to the dread of her helpless father.

2. I say the term “user” quite deliberately.