This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s summer editorial intern Connor Hanrahan. Find him on Instagram at @hannerhansmh. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
Since the early to mid 2010s, cigarettes have given most Zillennials the ick. They smell bad, it’s been ingrained in us that they give us cancer, and you cannot even purchase them until 21 in the United States, which is an age where we are typically weaning off our impulsive hormonal decisions. It’s safe to say that vaping has completely taken over. Vaping tastes better, it’s more convenient, it doesn’t make your entire life smell like a cigarette, and you can even do it indoors without people really noticing. Heck, it’s even been branded in such a way that it seems cute and a bit glitzy. Like, what could possibly be so harmful about something called a “Puff”? Well, a lot actually. How does vaping affect your life?
There are thousands of articles on the internet telling us why vaping is bad for us and listing a seemingly endless number of ways that the substance itself can harm our lungs and bodies. Every major health publication has articles on it, and even though vaping in particular has some unknowns, this doesn’t make it any better than cigarettes. However, this is not what we’re here to discuss because frankly, I’m not a doctor and this certainly isn’t a medical publication. We’re going to gloss over the social, motivational, and intangible impacts vaping can have on our day to day life.
Financial
Most people nowadays don’t use a traditional refillable brick vape because they look a bit corny and there’s a hilarious stigma around them and people who use them, which means they’re instead using disposable single battery life vapes. Nicotine addictions aren’t cheap, despite how little each vape may cost. You could only be spending $20 on a vape, but if you’re running through two per month, that’s already almost $500 per year just on nicotine. Not to mention that if you vape, you probably drink alcohol or smoke weed from time to time which essentially at least doubles this number to create your annual substance expenditure.
Learn more here.
Mental Health
Substance abuse is a slippery slope because everything you put into your body to make you feel a certain way or give you a “rush” is going to affect your homeostatic interpretation of happiness. Happiness is relative. It is simply when you feel better and more positive than usual and if you hit your vape all day, your body will recognize the feeling of nicotine as your resting homeostatic state. This will lead it to interpret your resting state without nicotine as “missing something” which is commonly thought of as withdrawals.
“Withdrawals” opens up a whole negative can of worms and these feelings are the root of all the “Where’s my vape? Have you seen my vape? I can’t find my vape. Are you sitting on my vape? Could you just get up for just a sec?” memes and situations that we meme the hell out of on a daily basis. Withdrawals can not only affect your happiness but also what others may think of you. There’s a stigma that comes with substance dependency that can be interpreted as weakness or desperation and it can even sometimes manifest as bitchiness because of behavior used when not able to feed the addiction. Withdrawals can also just straight up affect motivation.
Motivation
Generally, when we don’t feel good, we don’t want to do anything. We typically just want to lay there and self indulge until we magically acquire the energy necessary. The same behavior typically applies to fighting withdrawals. If you just “need your vape” but don’t have it, the chemical dependency in your brain won’t allow you to focus on anything very well as long as you aren’t feeding it nicotine, making it hard to perform any task well without your vape. I don’t know if you know anybody with a nicotine addiction, but if you do, you have definitely seen this behavior from them at some point. Even just having the vape available, not even using it, is typically enough to settle the nerves that come with not being able to hit it whenever you want to or feel you “need to”.
Learn more here.
The Workplace
There is a huge stigma that only young people vape. It is seen in not nearly as mature a light as smoking a cigarette and it’s often associated with a party lifestyle because to be real, there is no time anybody has ever wanted to hit a vape more than when they’re drunk and out at the bars. Displaying the same behavior (hitting the vape) at work that you do at bars gives employers a weird feeling. Hitting a vape is very much a Friday behavior, rather than a Monday one, and looks immature. I cannot explain it, but the connotation is definitely there. Even middle aged people who vape radiate the “45 going on 29” aura that can often be misconstrued with a lack of professionalism.
Health
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. Vaping is bad blah blah blah. The negative effects of vaping can manifest in many different ways but the one we’re going to cover is cardiovascular health. It is impossible to vape or smoke cigarettes and have good cardio because of the build up of tar and other substances in your lungs, and the shortness of breath that comes with smoking. This makes it harder to run any distances or even workout to the capacity you would be able to without vaping.
You may still be able to lift and build muscle, but your endurance and stamina will have diminishing returns between sets. In turn, this will affect how well you’re able to breathe at altitude. This will also affect you, you guessed it, in the bedroom. Being on top is such a full body workout that you will oftentimes find yourself asking to switch after even just a couple minutes, because your lungs can’t keep up with your body. I found that the best litmus test for this is yoga and pilates.
Yoga is typically not too strenuous when done at a base level, but even just holding your bodyweight in those positions can become labored when your body cannot adequately distribute oxygen to your muscles. Pilates is more difficult to begin with, but works some variations of the exact same muscles every time you do it. This means that those muscles will become strong after months of consistent pilates, making the direct effect of vaping more noticeable when you are suddenly gasping for breath while doing the same moves you’ve always done.
Learn more here.
These are just some of the many reasons not to vape. It doesn’t look cool, seem cool, or treat your body well, so why do it? After a few weeks of consistent vaping, you don’t even regularly get the rush, so why chase it? This is an issue that plagues so many young people and at this point it really just seems like we are all just trying to find some sort of rush that we could only get from real life experiences in substances that will never give it to us. So when you ask yourself how vaping will affect your life, just remember it will taint your brain’s perception of reality and do irreparable damage to your lungs and cardiovascular health.
What do you think? Did I miss anything? I vaped for about a year during my time at university and totally regretted it once I stopped because I could no longer meet my cardio fitness expectations. I would love to hear about your experience in the comments!
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