Breathing Happy Author

Smoking and Unemployment Part 2 of ProfessorTall007’s Trilogy

I am graciously accepting ProfessorTall007’s offer to continue the second part of her series concerning the root causes of smoking and its effects on unemployment and vice versa. Having had no practice in scholarly writing for the last ten years, I’m going to take the informal and speculative approach based merely on my personal observations. Unfortunately, I will have to premise these assumptions on my wanton addiction with Google News, Reddit and social media. The objective of this blog post: to supplement Professor Tall’s earlier conclusion that unemployment has an effect on the behavior of the young adult generation of today. 

As of May 2013, these are the unemployment numbers in the following countries (Data: Worldbank):

  • United States 7.6%
  • Spain 26.9%
  • Germany 5.3%
  • France 10.9%
  • Philippines 7.5%

The numbers are staggering yet in no way tell us of the stories simmering beneath them. One important disclosure before I begin: I do not live in the United States nor have I ever been to its shores. However, I do have my daily intake of popular American culture via our American-centric culture, media and of course the Internet. Moreover, I know it may hurt many of my Filipino brethren, but unfortunately it’s true. We Filipinos are heavily influenced by everything that is American. But that’s for another discussion. 

Evidently, the scholarly literature concerning a correlation with unemployment and smoking is plentiful. An abstract of “Unemployment, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and body weight in young British men“ by Scott Montgomery and others, in the European Journal of Public Health Vol. 8, Issue 1 confirms an already popularly held notion that “Unemployment may play a significant part in establishing life-long patterns of hazardous behavior in young men”. The study was conducted in Britain. (Source)

This was also echoed in “Smoking habits—a question of trend or unemployment? A comparison of young men and women between boom and recession” published in Family Medicine, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umeå University in Sweden. In the abstract, M. Novo and his team poses that “smoking habits were found to be a question of both unemployment and tobacco trends in society.”

(Source)

In ProfessorTall007’s own words, “As I continue to reflect on issues concerning today's youth, I dare to say: hopelessness, nicotine/ drug addiction, and suicide whether combined or taken separately constitute the real smoking gun of the consequences of youth unemployment in 2013.”

Now I would be a fool if I tried to answer this issue that predominantly traces its roots to American economics and politics. It would be easy to come up with clever sound bites like, “We need to create more jobs and opportunities and this – [insert your own agenda] is the way to do it”

However, I am not a politician.

What I would focus instead is the universality of this issue. The studies I have cited have been conducted in Britain and in Sweden, which are both a long way from the US. However, if you dig deeper and peruse Google Scholar’s archives and key in the words “unemployment” and “smoking” in the same search box, you’d have a preponderance of evidence suggesting the same conclusion for the United States. Unemployment and depression are indeed major factors when it comes to smoking and this holds true for most of the world.

Rather than formulating my own conclusion, in this case I’d like end this post by opting for something inspirational instead. If you are young and unemployed right now and reading this, I would like to offer this unsolicited tidbit: there is hope both in terms of your current state in employment and your smoking habit.

By going to this website and by reading this today, you have been given the power to choose your destiny regardless of what situation you are in today. You just to take the first step and believe.

 

 

 

 

Creative Commons Image via Flickr.

 

 

The Burdens of the Burning Cigarette

When you have an addiction you keep your friends down as well: true friends stick by your side, anything you can’t do because of smoking they won’t be doing neither, more than one life is affected when friends accept you for who you are. If they can do that, can’t you accept that you are dragging them around every time you take a drag?

Do you realize that your smoking habit loads you with more responsibilities than a non-smoking individual? Ask yourself this question. Do I want to be responsible for the outcome of my life as well as theirs? Responsibility, is multiplied when you are a smoker, people, generally speaking, tend to function in pairs. We call these pairs “best friends.” There is a forsaken code of conduct that we do whatever our friends are doing, scientifically speaking, we call this influence—and our friends have a lot of it, or shall I say YOU THE SMOKER have a cargo of influence that you’d never think of. Consider this:

My experience: Whenever my friend takes a breathing break at the gym, I don’t want to leave them lonely so I too take breaks even though I am fully charged…

My experience: Whenever I am upset at my computer I call it “stupid, and I slam it” ( bad internet connection). When my wife is writing in her notebook and she gets upset, as if she inherited my traits, she does the exact same thing “insult, then slam” –bad habits due to her being my friend and associating my habits with her own life.

Smokers are under the belief that they need cigarettes. Well, most people are vocal about it, sharing this with none other than their best friends. What we do as smokers is we demonstrate to anyone around us what it is to ‘need’ something. Some of our best friends are family members, or our own children. So what we do is we model the obsession as a stress reliever, we gossip about the fix it presents for the moment. There’s a saying, when you are doing something bad, do it away from children. Because children will perceive this, and feel accustomed to acting the same way towards it or associate it with other things they may encounter—just like our friends. Examples would be: our habits rubbing off on them, and them showing the same ‘need’ for alcohol, cigarettes, or something worse.

 

 

*Image courtesy Flickr creative commons.

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