I quit smoking and all I have to show for it is this beautiful house where my amazing mother can retire early and in peace, free from the financial pressure that had come to define our lives.
By the end, in early June, the cost of my habit was more than $1,000 a month – more than half the cost of the monthly mortgage, which I’d entered into just weeks before. It’s a shameful number, though not the reason I stopped smoking. However, it is the reason I can never go back to smoke.
After smoking openly for 17 years and hideously since the pandemic, my apparent need for tobacco was taking control of even my social calendar. I avoided gatherings where I thought it would not be easy to smoke, or where I assumed people would prefer I didn’t. Dinner parties at houses? Almost entirely out of the question. I’d have to excuse myself from the table, scurry outside and then come back smelling like flambéed regret. No thank you.
When I heard my friend’s four-year-old son went to the back of the house one night yelling “Riiiiiick” while he looked for me in the yard where I always hid to have a dart, I was disturbed.
Somehow, I had become one of those sad old men from the Quit ads who just wanted to play cricket with their boy one last time but couldn’t on account of the emphysema. And I wasn’t even a dad!
All the while, the price I was paying for a packet of cigarettes was increasing.
A new research from the University of Queensland suggests more people now are motivated to cut down or stop smoking altogether by the cost than for health reasons. Tobacco excise has risen by 25% in 2010 and 12.5% each year between 2013 and 2020.
I never went without cigarettes in that time but many other things were skipped: food, rent, the god-damned dentist.
The addiction came first, always, and honestly I’d do the same again. Not because I ever particularly wanted to be a smoker, mind you, but because my mental health was abysmal and it wasn’t being treated effectively.
I wasn’t diagnosed properly.
There is much evidence that establishes a link between pre-existing mental health illnesses and a smoking habit. And, cruel world, there is an even bigger causal link between poverty or financial stress and poor mental health. The effect of this is to make the conditions for escape from addiction that much harder for those with the least.
When I started working from home, I joked that the reason I suddenly learned to cook anything other than the most depressing Dolmio spagbol was because, for the first time in my life, I had time, money and stable mental health. Except, this wasn’t a joke. It was true.
I also started learning French. And then I stopped smoking, which is decidedly not French, but here we are.
Before this triumvirate of prerequisites was in place, there was precious little scope for self-improvement. It was all I could do to get out of bed and turn up for work. I loathed the self-motivational types who said “Bill Gates has the same amount of hours in a given day as you, so what’s your excuse?” and my excuse is that I didn’t have a billion dollars and my tummy hurt all the time for no good reason.
Of course, Mum had begged me to stop smoking for years. Something about wanting to see her son grow up. These things don’t work on true smokers. Grisly advertising? Not bothered. Think of your health! And what, live in this place a little longer? The smell? Sorry, can’t smell.
Anyway, the cost grew around me. It was simply an unpleasant fact of life, like long-drop toilets and parasitic wasps.
But there was always the house I promised to buy Mum when I was still in primary school. It was actually a granny-flat, I proposed, at the back of whatever giant home I imagined buying for myself as a child before I knew anything about the singular madness of the Australian real estate scene.
It’s funny how things work out.
Mum has the home she has always deserved, for being the best of us. And I have been a non-smoker long enough to break the money blindness. That monthly outlay is now part of my promise to Mum. I wouldn’t dare break it.
I don’t need my own house yet. I intend on living in a sock suspended from a nail, like a baby kangaroo. But it will be a nice sock. A non-smoking sock.
Rick Morton is a journalist for the Saturday Paper and author of My Year of Living Vulnerably and One Hundred Years of Dirt
• This article was amended on 24 August 2022 to remove an image with out-of-date cigarette packaging.
