I grew up in the 80’s / early 90s when smoking indoors was still common (restaurants, buses, etc). You just kind of got used to it.
Eventually I started smoking, and it was less of a bother 😆 (have since quit).
The thing I never could figure out, even as a smoker, was how people smoked in a car with the windows rolled up. It was unbearable even being the one smoking. Even in the dead of winter and negative one million degrees outside, I always had to have a window cracked.
Being a non-smoker back then was a giant pain-in-the-ass at any workplace too because any smoker could and would take a break for a cigarette once an hour and then so would the manager and they’d get to be buddies but if you were known as a non-smoker you didn’t get a break because you “didn’t need one” I knew dozens of people, especially in healthcare, who took up smoking because that was the time to be social with each other and the managers.
You grew up in it and didn’t notice.
But after the bans the first thing that stood out is you don’t need to bleach every piece of fabric you took outside every day. The first time I went out, woke up the next day and my clothes didn’t smell… you know, smoky I was very confused. Up until that point I assumed that was just what happened to dirty clothes, I didn’t realize it was all the cigarettes.
My wife tells me that when she used to go clubbing she would come home with burn marks/holes in her dresses all the time.
Got one on my brand new t-shirt I had bought with my student loan money… That was fucking annoying.
one of the first times I noticed was when it was banned on flights
There’s a local bowling alley I went to as a kid. I didn’t go back until 2-3 years after the indoor cigarette ban. Once I went in I immediately said “Something’s different…”
Then someone said there’s no more smoke, that was my Aha! moment.
You didn’t. As a child you got sick a lot with respiratory illnesses and ear infections, and you went to school reeking of cigs. But you didn’t realize it because you were surrounded by it. The quality of what you ate was often not as good either, because your parents couldn’t taste their food. And we’re probably still dealing with the long term health effects without knowing it.
It’s also fun whe you have to scrape the nicotine stains off the windows and scrub the walls when you finally sell your parents home.
I was so thankful my grandparents’ house was sold to be torn down and rebuilt. There was zero chance that the house with windows NEVER open for 50+ years could have been cleaned or deoderized.
The epigenetic effects of this sort of damage take a couple generations to clear up. Gen alpha is probably the first one to widely grow up without these being a problem.
