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What I learnt about cravings when I quit smoking I quit smoking in November 2021, after a ten-year stint. I was a pack-a-day’er of the shag variant, and I smoked like my life depended on it. It would be first thing in the morning and then on the hour throughout the day, usually at the 50-min mark. I started smoking at 16, and I did it with every intention of becoming addicted. I wanted to be a smoker, however annoyingly ignorant that sounds. I was born in 1995, and while many of us drank that heroin-chic Kool-Aid, I gulped it down and asked for refills. But of course, I would rue the day I ever thought smoking cigarettes gave me an edge. What once felt like a rebellious act eventually turned into feeling like I was in an abusive relationship with myself. So, after years of hammering away at my self esteem, my lungs and my teeth, I finally ga e in and gave up. Cigarettes weaken your capacity to yearn eryone knows withdrawal is difficult, but the ways in which it was difficult blew me away. es, I was very depressed and constantly annoyed. I was, in general, acting like a toddler whose pacifier had been taken away. But, once the smoke cleared (so to speak), I began to realise that what I had thought was so impossible about giving up cigarettes is, in fact, just that which is impossible about finding relief. pecifically, my response to e ery emotion and sensation within my body for ten years had been ‘smoke’. But then, I was faced again with that constant feeling of an itch I couldn’t scratch. I began to realise that everyone is craving something all the time. To be human is, to a Lacanian analyst anyway, to be in a state of yearning. But cigarettes offered me the illusion of a solution to that yearning.
Why would you smoke? While many psychological studies describe motives like peer pressure, lack of education about risk, and various underlying mental health issues as reasons a person might pick up smoking, there are few critical studies on the subject. However, we can arrive at a point of departure using Lacanian psychoanalysis. The Lacanian concept of desire Jacques Lacan – a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist from the 20th century – argued that desire is at the core of our identity. By that, he meant a Hegelian type of desire, one that implies a continuous force. In its most reduced form, his theory goes: Babies exist in a state of ‘primary narcissism’. This is a Freudian concept that means the baby can only perceive herself and everything around her as created by her. Because of this, she experiences herself as the most magnificent thing a concept known as the ego-ideal). But she is also terrifyingly dependent on her primacy caregiver, who, in this case, we will refer to as her mother. So, she feels safe in the presence of her mother and terrified in her absence. Due to her state of primary narcissism, her perception of her mother’s absence, in a nonverbal manner, goes something like: “Why would she leave when I am so perfect? There must be something out there that is more perfect than me. I must find that thing. If I can become it, my mother will always be with me. Then, I will be safe.” Over the years, we mould ourselves into that which we perceived ourselves to be lacking – that which our mother left us for. But, in reality, she left her baby to open the door, take a call or go to the bathroom. There was never a beyond-perfection person or place.
In everyday life, this ‘feels’ like that strange sense of disappointment you cannot place whenever you achieve a goal or a dream. That silent itch of ‘I thought there would be more than this’. To cope with that feeling, we then turn our attention to the next best thing. We focus on other goals we can achie e, thinking maybe we d find it there. Hence, we end up in a constant state of craving. …And how does this relate to smoking? As far as I can see, the cigarette localises desire. We don’t need to think about where else we could try to find that relief. en deeper still, they comfort us with the idea that relief is attainable and cravings can be extinguished. Because of that, we feel an illusionary sense of control over our lives. All of this to say, if you want to quit smoking and feel as trapped as I did, lean into the idea that you will always be craving something. The cigarette is just a distraction. And, if nothing else, it adds far more suffering than any ambiguous dissatisfaction can. Written by Molly Fitz
Modern Dutch Heroes: Boyan Slat around the globe, which in turns carry this waste to the planet s oceans. here are currently fi e large concentrations of these ‘garbage patches’, the largest being the reat acific arbage Patch – a concentration of plastic and trash that is swirling between California and Hawaii, that is the size of exas. nd anyone who s dri en or e en flown across exas knows that is huge
What did you want to do when you were a teenager? What did you want to do in the future? If you were like me, you probably wanted to have fun with friends, travel and see the world, and a job that sounded cool at the time (me, I wanted to be a pediatrician). And we all probably wanted to give back in some way. But most of us probably didn’t think we would change the whole world, or at least not in a seismic way – except for Boyan Slat. Boyan Slat is an inventor, entrepreneur and climate advocate who is the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, a non profit start up organization that seeks to rid the world’s oceans and waterways of the world of plastics and debris. This gigantic undertaking has been more than 7 years in the making and is getting close to full scale deployment of dozens of debris-extracting systems. Once deployed, the organization predicts that it will take years to clean up of the reat acific arbage atch. This is a feat that sounds almost too grand to really even wrap your head around it. To give Mr. Slat’s ambitious – but entirely doable task some context plastic filled garbage makes its way from our garbage to rivers and waterways
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Researchers, engineers and environmental advocates have been working for years on developing a workable and scalable solution to clean this mess up, while not disrupting the delicate marine ecosystem, and being as carbonneutral as possible. The best estimates of the time this colossal task would take was 78,000 years (yes, you read that correctly). So, while designers and engineers continued to do what they could, the oceans continued – and continue to get filled with massi e olumes of plastic garbage. It is estimated that the volume of plastic pouring into the oceans every week could fill the mpire tate uilding two times. nd anyone whose been to New ork City or e en seen a postcard image of the skyline knows that that is a lot of plastic. And plastic garbage is not just in these ocean patches; it is littering beaches, reefs and killing marine life. The plastic problem has grown from the beach of developing nations all the way to the pristine beaches of the Greeks islands, where Boyan Slat and his family were vacationing circa 2010. While diving in the Aegean Sea on that Greek vacation, 16-year-old Boyan was shocked to disco er more plastic trash than fish in the water. Most people would be disappointed with seeing so much plastic, but Boyan was more than just disappointed – he was inspired. He took this experience and used it as the subject of a high
school project and through the next few years thought learned what he could about the problem and dreamed of the solution. As a student in aerospace engineering at the acclaimed Delft University of Technology, Boyan started The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 and began raising capital to fund the project. Investors include Mark Benioff (CEO of Salesforce), Maersk cargo shipping and oyal D . he organization has just completed several runs of its version 2 ocean prototype (the Jenny, named after Robin Wright’s character in Forest Gump) and its version 1 river prototype (the Inceptor) and is now ready for wider-scale deployment. It is estimated that of the reat acific arbage atch will be cleaned up with only 3,000 deployments of the Jenny. With ten ships, that’s only 300 trips per ship. Not only do these machines extract, sort, clean and index every piece of trash that they clean up, they also create plastic pellets that companies can purchase and make into consumer goods. The Ocean Cleanup has also teamed up with designers and eyewear manufacturers to create designer sunglasses as a proof of concept and to continue funding the project. Boyan Slat’s vision and goals have now expanded into the next phase of the world’s plastic problem. While other entrepreneurs and CEOs are busy building rockets to fly ber wealthy people into outer space or are busy finding new ways to expand their wealth at the expense of online truth and privacy, Boyan Slat is looking to tackle world problems on a large scale and in a short time. The world needs more people like Boyan Slat, a true modern Dutch hero for the world. Written by Marla Thomson
02-03-2022 15:25
