How Gen Z Brought Smoking Back

My sexual awakening was watching Serge Gainsbourg. Specifically, it was watching Serge Gainsbourg inhaling and exhaling fumes of white smoke that permeated through the black and white screen of his first performance of L’eau à la bouche in 1960. In it, he gazes nervously into the camera as the intro instrumentals hum in the background, and the smoke drifts from his mouth and occasionally serves as a blind to obscure his eyes.

Years later, around 2015, Gainsbourg was still at the forefront of my mind when I tried lighting my first cigarette with a friend in Toronto. This had to be easy and sexy, because I’d obsessively watched him and countless others like Mick Jagger, James Baldwin, Françoise Hardy and Chloë Sevigny light up. I was obviously a pro who just needed to prove herself. My arrogance had long evaporated by the time my bite marks and saliva dampened the unlit cigarette tip. I burned my finger by accident and let out a scream, and the cigarette fell lifelessly onto the ground.

Why was this so hard? It was supposed to be (or look) effortless. Even after successfully lighting one up by the fourth try, I couldn’t get past two puffs before the breeze blew the light out. I’d spent years building up to this moment, but the reality was deeply depressing.

The humiliation could’ve been reason enough to quit, but I was stirring with a desire to master this deceivingly effortless act. Unlike the instant dopamine hits my generation was raised with on our phones, the cigarette was the guy in real life, playing hard to get. Smoking vicariously through a screen wasn’t enough. I needed research, practice and patience to learn the craft, and only when I hit this wall of reality did I understand that I was willing to stay seated. 

Related: Why I Switched From a Smartphone to a Dumb Phone

Yes, smoking rates among teenagers in Canada have been steadily declining since the early 2000s, and Canadian Gen Zs are significantly less likely to have tried smoking compared to those born in the last century. But the habit’s mystique is on the rise: the number of movies depicting tobacco increased in 2023 for the first time since 2020, and 70 per cent of top binge-watched shows in 2023 had tobacco imagery. 

Celebrities with large Gen-Z followings like Dua Lipa, Paul Mescal, Jeremy Allen White and Rosalía are often photographed with cigarettes. Odessa A’zion and Kylie Jenner posed with cigarettes in magazines, Charli XCX served Vogue Essence Bleue slims on silver platters at her wedding, Addison Rae sings “Guess I gotta accept the pain, need a cigarette to make me feel better,” and Instagram account @cigfluencers, which posts famous people smoking, now has more than 100,000 followers. Gen Z is apparently smoking again—or at least thinking it’s cool again.

Culture critics point to several reasons for my generation’s reviving attraction to cigarettes, like the performativity of the posers who post online with a cigarette to look cool but don’t actually smoke, and the glamorization of all things retro. I can’t deny that there’s the cringey coolness factor formed by decades of Big Tobacco–funded media portrayals of smoking cigarettes. But that’s every generation’s uniform of youth, whether they were raised watching James Dean or Lana Del Rey. 

Related: Snail Mail’s Big Comeback

The second hypothesis is more Gen Z specific. Unlike most modern sources of dopamine hits—including the abhorrent vape—smoking is retro, not just because of the aesthetics, but because of the physical craft it requires to master. There’s parsing through different brands and types of cigarettes to select which fit best as stress relief, hangover cure, dessert and party favours; pacing your double inhales; and learning the art of rolling your own. Learning how to smoke contains layers of recognizing and designing what tastes and feels right to you: a foreign feeling to the algorithm generation. 

Compared to our predecessors, my generation—and the even more chronically online one that’s coming up behind us—rarely has to master a skill to experience pleasure. Reaching a dopamine high is more accessible than ever, but because it’s constant through our smartphones, we risk losing ways to have tactile experiences and reach pleasure on our own. If you have a Pinterest feed or Spotify playlist determined by what the algorithm thinks is your taste, it becomes hard to know how to build taste in real life. And if you can sit on your toilet and watch a TikTok showing the view from the top of Mount Everest that people have (literally) died to climb and see, it becomes difficult to understand the value of an experience, putting in effort and cultivating craftsmanship.

Related: The Case Against Gen Z Botox

So while it’s undoubtedly horrible for my health, smoking gives me a sense of regaining and being in control of my pleasure. It’s the sense of being in the know, of understanding what it takes to indulge in the craft of cigarette smoking—including but not limited to the tattered skin of the thumb that flicks the lighter, the depth of the inhale that dictates the sensation’s intensity, the timing and vigour of ashing, and understanding when enough time has passed to kiss someone without giving them the most revolting taste of their life.

And seeing a smoker of my age on the street makes me recognize that they, too, value the wait amid the digital storm of a world we live in. Cigarette smoking teaches a slower way to reach pleasure for a generation that’s been inundated with it but has never learned how to attain it for themselves. 

I still think smoking is stupid. Decades of research and every graphic image plastered on cigarette packs in Canada make it clear that you will die a horrible death if you continue smoking. Even while writing this piece, I felt like an idiot reckoning that I was risking the ashification of my lungs to satisfy my craving for a skill that I’ve already mastered. I don’t think more people should smoke those disgusting sticks. 

But rather than jumping to cast stones at Gen Z for allegedly starting smoking again, the resurgence of smoking is a chance for society to reflect on two things: what our convenience culture of technology and algorithms is making younger generations yearn for and, above all, how inanely flawed humans are. Only humans can see mountains of evidence proving cigarettes’ adverse effects and still be stupid enough to take a drag. And maybe this is why AI-fuelled robots won’t ever be human: they’re not stupid enough and, as a result, just not interesting enough.

What did you think of this story? Send a comment for publication to letters@macleans.ca, and supply your name and address. Comments should be fewer than 200 words, and may be edited for length and clarity.