“Every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off your life.” As a kid, hearing this from presenters at school frightened me – my dad was a smoker (I still am, cause I am a big dum dum). At the time, I wasn’t a smoker, but I was concerned that my dad was shortening his life span. I was young and had zero concept of statistics or narrative. So I assumed these presenters were some how capable of calculating that the seven minutes was coming off the entire life span of a human. So the average smoker was taking years off the end of their life each month.
As I grew older, I thought about it (didn’t research it) and came to a conclusion – “The motherfuckers lied to me”. I don’t like being lied to and I was pretty sure there is no way to know how long a life span is (with 100% confidence), but you would have to know: a human’s lifespan, the amount of cigarettes smoked, and then you would be able to calculate the total length of lifespan someone had lost. With these pieces of data, you just divide by the amount of cigarettes, and boom, seven minutes becomes the amount of time you lose off your life when you smoke.
My dad is my hero, he always has been because of the sacrifices he made for my family (my mom is also my hero, but she gets her own blog post about how she killed snakes to protect her kids). So, when someone told me my dad was literally knocking off seven minutes with each cigarette, I grew sad; I didn’t want to lose my dad sooner because of his horrible habit (the irony that I smoke is not lost on me).
Now, while I hate that someone instilled that fear in me, I am grateful because it became the first instance where I learned how you can use words and truth (bended) to trick someone. The seven minutes they are talking about comes from the length of how long it takes to smoke a cigarette. So it isn’t you shortening your life, it is you wasting seven minutes of your life to smoke a cigarette (but I usually smoke and read so that doesn’t impact me).
Either way, I need to quit smoking. Maybe tomorrow…