Philip Morris: Our New Years Resolution is to Stop Making Cigarettes
Also: New Years Resolution Thread

Philip Morris has been getting more into the smoke-free e-cig market for some time. I don't expect them to follow through on this "resolution." It seems just to be a publicity-generating statement.

Still...

Philip Morris International has made a dramatic New Year's resolution: "We're trying to give up cigarettes."

What?

The maker of such cigarette brands as Marlboro, L&M, Parliament and Chesterfield took out full-page ads in several newspapers in the United Kingdom that said its new ambition in 2018 is to build a smoke-free future and eventually stop selling cigarettes.

The manifesto, as described on the company's web site, is to help people quit smoking traditional cigarettes and to one day replace them all with smoke-free alternatives like e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products.

The company claims the alternatives are less harmful and that "we can achieve a significant public-health benefit only when a large number of these smokers switch from cigarettes to better products."

The Philip Morris ad states: "No cigarette company has done anything like this before. You might wonder if we really mean it."

If anyone's interested in quitting smoking for the New Year, e-cigs are a good way to do it. I had quit cold-turkey for a while, then went on to e-cigs on doctor's advice.

No really. I had complained of a lack of focus and a cardiologist said, "Well I can't officially suggest this as a doctor, but you could try an e-cig..."

Since then, I've reduced the nicotine level I was getting from 0.18, to 0.12, to 0.06, to 0.03, and just ten or so days ago, 0.015. I'm looking to go down to 0.01 or even 0.005 and then just quit entirely. It's not that it's a very dangerous habit; it's just an unnecessary one, and it's a contributing factor to my high blood pressure.

Which isn't really that high any more. So maybe if I stopped with the nicotine, I could ditch the HBP medicine. That would be a win.

The e-cig still has some of the pain-in-the-ass factor of smoking. Sure, you can get away with puffing an e-cig in a lot of places, but you can't puff in all places, and you still have to do a little bit of annoying nicotine-dosing planning. One advantage of the e-cig is that there is no time commitment to taking a hit -- with a cigarette, you're kind of committed to the full five minutes of smoking when you light one up. With an e-cig, you can take two quick puffs and you haven't wasted any product.

So there's less time devoted to the addiction than with cigarettes, but there's still some. Heading out into the cold during a meal, for example, just to take three power puffs, for example.

I'd like to reclaim that small amount of time I'm still wasting on nursing the nicotine addiction.

The e-cig's pain-in-the-ass factor is an order of magnitude less than cigarettes' time-wasting factor. When I quit smoking, I was very surprised at how much extra time I had -- time I had previously spent going outside to smoke, etc. I would guess I suddenly had 90 extra minutes each day, maybe more.

90+ extra minutes a day? Pretty damn great. At first, I felt a little agitated about it. It felt like there was something I was meant to be doing, but wasn't. Almost as if I was skipping out on work and felt guilty about it. But that passes in a week or so. And it just gives you more time for masturbating.

But even with the e-cig, you're still going to have some smaller amount of time that you waste for nicotine breaks.

As I've also suggested before, The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr is a must for the psychological side of tobacco dependency. Even with an e-cig, where you're getting as much or more nicotine than you get with a real cigarette, your addiction is going to make up excuses as to why this slightly different nicotine ingestion experience is so unsatisfying that you must begin smoking real cigarettes again.

The Easy Way to Quit Smoking is a good defense against the lies the brain parasite we call addiction is going to tell you to keep itself alive.

BTW, there is one true noticeable chemical difference between the e-cig and a real cigarette, as far as effect on the brain: e-cigarettes do not deliver the poison called carbon monoxide. I think it's the carbon monoxide that gives you the slightly goofy, dizzy feeling when you over-smoke. It's absent in e-cigs, and your addiction will probably notice that and try to convince you that carbon monoxide is a non-negotiable necessity of the nicotine ingestion habit. In reality, it's just a byproduct with no real upside (which nicotine does have, obviously) and with additional downsides.

Anyway, if Philip Morris is thinking about quitting the cigarette habit, eh, maybe give it a shot. With the e-cig, it's now as painless a process as it ever will be, though, I have to stress, your addiction will constantly be telling you that every minor, trivial difference between the e-cig and real cigarettes is hugely important and so you should go right back to cigs.

Okay, enough of my nagging.

New Years Resolutions Part of Post.

Have you made any New Years Resolutions?

I have a bunch:

1. Be up at at 'em by 9am every morning. I know this sounds stupid, but yeah, this would be my version of "early rising."

2. Have my exercise done by 10:30 am. Currently I put it off and off and it winds up squashing the whole day because it's always out in front of me instead of done and forgotten. And on this one, I really need to finally start doing mobility/stretching/yoga type stuff on my non-weightlifting days, instead of just being tight and sore all the time.

3. Fix the damn Sonobi and cellphone hijacks going on on the site.

4. Stop watching so much TV. I've watched less TV, but not as little as I'd like. Also, I've largely just replaced TV with YouTube stuff, which I have to ratchet down. Maybe I should set a one hour or 90 minute per day hard limit. Which would get me to...

5. Read more.

6. Phase 3 of the shelves. Yeah I haven't started Phase 3. I just have the shelves.

7. Clean everything up and be neater and semi-organized for once.

8. Learn how to lockpick. I got this cool set of pics and practice locks (with see-through bodies so you can see yourself manipulating the pins) from Amazon. Haven't tried them yet, though.

9. Finally learn Italian and Spanish. Which I started trying to do a year and a half ago but didn't go very far with.

10. Become a Real Expert like Tom Nichols or all the other geniuses on Twitter.

Well that's a big list. I've heard that Bullet Journaling is helpful for getting through goals, but that seems like a whole new entry in the resolution list. I don't know if I could actually do that.

Does anyone do that? And-- does anyone do that who was not already a pretty organized and future-planning person, like me? Has anyone used this technique (or any other technique, actually) to successfully gender transition from disorganized to at least somewhat organized?

Below, a video of that What I've Learned guy on creating habits and increasing willpower.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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