Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
I have known many smokers who were constantly under financial stress. I have rarely seen one of them without a cigarette.
And, for more years than I enjoy remembering, I was one of them.
There were times in my early adulthood when money was not tight in the way people usually mean when they turn that phrase; it was not a matter of postponing a vacation. There were weeks when the question of food was genuinely open, not starvation or anything so dramatic, but the type that arrives with arithmetic, where you know what is in the cabinet and you know what day it is and you know those two facts do not agree with each other.
A frozen pizza from Walmart during those years was a good night. I remember the specific pleasure of it, and I think most people who have never had that arithmetic riding along on the drive home struggle to believe it.
And through all of it, there was always money for a pack of cigarettes. Not sometimes, or when things were going well. Always; and not the sort of ‘always’ that implies I bought cigarettes when I could afford them, or that every pack and carton was a premium (or even recognizable) brand, or that I went without when I couldn’t.
It was that the cigarettes came out of the money first, and everything else negotiated over what was left. Food and gas negotiated. The pack did not.
Nobody asked me to rank those things. If someone had sat me down and asked what mattered more, food or cigarettes, I would have given the correct answer, and I would have meant it. The ranking I actually held was not in anything I said. It was in what I did every two days, and it was completely unambiguous in practice, despite being the opposite of what I believed about myself.
The worst part is the eventual realization that each purchase, and each choice that allowed it, was work.
Maintaining that habit at that income took ongoing, active, deliberate effort. There were days I had to find the money – actually find it, go looking in cushions and coin jars, or move something around and decide against something else. There were trips made specifically to pick them up, and I knew the price at the gas station on my morning commute. There was a quiet, persistent, low-grade vigilance about supply that I would not have applied to almost anything else in my life at that age.
If you had taken the total attention I spent keeping myself in cigarettes over those years and pointed it at learning a language, I would have become fluent.
We have a thousand cultural stories about decline, and most of them say the same thing: that it is a slide. A hill, a gradient, or a slope you end up at the bottom of because you stopped paying attention. In that framing, gravity does the work. You drift.
I do not think that is true, and I have specific reason not to think so. Nobody drifts into an expensive habit while broke. That takes commitment, often exactly the kind of commitment we praise when it is aimed somewhere else.
Wheel and Screw
Humans are obsessed with cycles, and I think the obsession is older than anything we would call thought. Seasons, tides, the moon, orbits, harvests, menstrual cycles, the liturgical calendar, the fiscal year, and even the week – which, somewhat annoyingly, is not even a natural period. We build our lives out of things that pass, and then come back around.
But notice what we do with them once we have them. We almost never try to stop a cycle. We try to change one. Books about building habits and breaking habits sell endlessly, to the same people, over and over. Entire subcultures organize the day around where the planets were at the moment of a person’s birth. An enormous genre of fiction has grown up around cultivation and progression, in which a character does more or less the same training over and over and rises through numbered stages of power because of it. Every January, a hundred million people do not attempt to leave the year. They attempt to aim the next one with a new resolution.
What all of that has in common is the promise that the repetition adds up. That this turn is not the same as the last turn, and that with each turn of the cycle, something is being made.
The image I keep coming back to is that we fail to differentiate between whether a pattern is a wheel or a screw. We constantly observe the cycle, but fail to acknowledge the effect.
A wheel turns and returns; it ends where it started. It can move you, but only because it is in contact with ground it can push against, and the wheel itself gains nothing from the trip. A screw performs the identical motion, the same rotation, over and over, indistinguishable from the outside, but a screw has a thread.
Because of the thread, every revolution moves it. It goes somewhere. Importantly, it does not go somewhere instead of turning; it goes somewhere by turning.
So one pack of cigarettes, in my experience, is not one purchase. It is one revolution of something threaded. It is not the pack that does anything. It is the pack, two days later, and again two more, and the shape those repetitions cut into the years.
The version of this idea that gets sold is a binary: you are either building yourself up or tearing yourself down, every choice counts, and nothing is neutral. I believe that this is both exhausting and false. There is a third state, and it is the one most of us are in most of the time.
Some cycles truly are just wheels. They turn, they return, they cut nothing meaningful in either direction. They are not ruining you and they are not building anything. They are simply how the time gets spent.
Much of life may be no more consequential than that.
The trouble starts when a wheel is mistaken for a screw. When someone believes they are climbing and they are only turning.
Every Other Year
A family member of mine takes a cruise every other year.
The cruise is good for them, genuinely. It produces rest, which they need. It produces a week in which the ordinary machinery of their life is switched off, which almost nothing else in their year does. It produces photographs with loved ones that they look at afterward, a shared reference that returns at holidays, and the particular kind of closeness that comes from two people being somewhere unfamiliar together with nothing urgent waiting for them.
I do not think any of that is trivial and I do not think it should be defended. Rest is not a luxury that has to justify itself against a spreadsheet.
The only observation I want to make about the cruise is that it returns.
Every other year, the behavior repeats at roughly the same coordinates. The ship, the port, the week, the return. And in between, a great deal of talk about money. Mostly stress about it. Complaints that are neither performative nor exaggerated, about how much things cost and how little there is and how tired they are of doing the arithmetic.
And then, at the appropriate interval, another cruise.
For a while, I treated those facts as evidence against each other. I assumed that someone who was genuinely frightened by money would not spend it that way, and so either the worry or the cruise had to be less sincere than it appeared.
The cruise and the worry can both be real. In fact, they are probably produced by the same life: the exhaustion that makes the expense difficult is also what makes the escape necessary.
But that does not make the cruise a wheel, and this is where the simple version of my own metaphor breaks down.
The cruise does leave something behind. There is rest. There are memories. There is a week that becomes part of a marriage and a family history, and those things accumulate even if no account records them. And the money also leaves something behind. The expense narrows what can be done afterward. The stress returns with slightly less room around it. The intervening years may deepen the need for the same escape, even as its cost leaves less room around everything else.
The same revolution can cut more than one thread.
That is what the language of virtuous and vicious cycles conceals. Most repetitions do not move a life cleanly upward or downward. They widen one part while narrowing another. They produce intimacy and anxiety, relief and cost, memory and obligation, and the accounting does not happen on a single ledger.
What repetition does is make the trade consequential.
One cruise is an event. A cruise every other year becomes a structure. It becomes part of how rest is imagined, how the time is divided, what must be saved for, and what the difficult months between departures are understood to be leading toward. The pattern begins to shape not only the money but the meaning of the years around it.
And as long as something repeats, it can feel as though a process is underway. Motion resembles progress from inside the moving thing. The calendar advances, another trip arrives, photographs are added to the collection, and the cycle acquires enough history to look like a direction.
I would not say the cruise is a mistake. I would say that some of what it cuts is invisible from where it is being chosen, and that the years are going by at the same rate they go by for everyone.
The Winter House
There is a second perspective on the cruise, and it is the half that actually explains it.
The friends. A couple they have known a long time, who sold an agricultural operation years ago and retired early, and who now spend their winters in Florida, and several weeks of their summers, to no great surprise, on cruises.
That is the contrasting picture that is visible from where my family member is standing: a house, a season, a life that appears to have arrived.
What is not visible when planning any trip is the farm. Decades of it.
The equipment payments and the weather and the years the price was bad, the mornings that started before anyone else’s, the maintenance, the debt, the small decisions about which field and which crop and which loan, the physical toll, and the total absence of anything resembling a week where the machinery is switched off.
Decades, of the least glamorous compounding process available to a human being, and then, at the end, one transaction that turned all of it into money. Nobody watched that. You can’t. What everyone on the outside sees is the terminal state.
And this, I have come to think, is the deepest problem in the whole business, deeper than discipline, willpower, or any of the other vocabulary we usually reach for when discussing a person’s choices.
Processes are invisible; outcomes are not. So we look at other people’s outcomes and we buy the symbol, because the symbol is the only part that was ever recognizable to us.
That is not stupidity. If anything, it is a perception problem, a structural one, that everyone has by default. My family member is not confused about the mathematics. They are looking at the one part of their friends’ lives that can be seen from outside, and reaching for it in the only way that is currently available, which is a week at a time, every other year.
I have the same problem in the other direction, and it is worth admitting.
I do not have a degree, having been unable to justify the cost at the time, or at any since. What I do have, though, is a decade of teaching myself things after work, reading documentation on weekends, breaking things and fixing them, collecting certifications nobody asked me to earn, and building small projects with limited utility for the sole purpose of understanding how something works.
From the outside, during those previous years and on any given weekend now, it all looks like nothing at all. It looks like a guy on a computer, and it produces no visible object, no announcements, and little other evidence besides.
To be honest, even from the inside, most days it also looks like nothing. There has never been a point during the last decade at which I could have told you with confidence that some great plan was working. I could not have distinguished it from wasted time with any tangible evidence.
The thread is often being cut at a depth you cannot see, and the only report you get is delivered years later, all at once, and by then the cutting is long done.
So the same invisibility runs both ways. It hides the labor of maintaining a farm from the person admiring the winter house. It hides the value of the work from the person doing it. And it is the reason the whole subject is so hard to think about clearly: the mechanism that matters is precisely the one we are least equipped to observe.
The Piano Key
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is generally cited as a case for freedom; the man who insists that a human being is not a piano key, not a stop on an organ, and certainly not something that can be played by whoever knows the arrangement.
He rejects the idea that if you simply explained a man’s true interests to him he would pursue them, and says a person will act against his own advantage for no reason other than to prove that he can; that he will insist that two and two make five, if two and two making four has started to feel inescapable.
That is usually quoted as a defense of the human spirit, but it is worth remembering what he does with it.
He wrecks himself. Deliberately, elaborately, with a great deal of intelligence, over the course of the entire book. Dostoevsky did not pick a heroic example by accident. The freedom being described – the capacity to act against immediate appetite, obvious calculation, or the course prescribed for you – is the same faculty in both directions.
It is the faculty that lets a person burn a life down to prove that nobody, including their own interests, gets to tell them what to do.
There is no second, better version of it; it is one capacity. This is the part that the inspirational reading always leaves out, and the one that makes the whole thing serious.
And then there is the other half of Dostoevsky, which sits directly on top of everything I have been describing. The Grand Inquisitor’s charge is that freedom is unbearable. Further, that people do not actually want it, that they will hand it over to anyone who will take it and give them bread and certainty in exchange, and that they will be grateful for the chance.
I think that is what all of it is. The habit systems we read and sometimes build, the horoscopes some study, the cultivation ladders where enough repetitions inevitably produce ascension. Each one is an offer to do the steering. Each one says: turn this many times and you will arrive, and you will not have to keep asking whether you are going anywhere, because the asking is the thing that hurts.
We do not want to steer the wheel. We want a wheel that steers.
What It Leaves You
So if consistency by itself is not a virtue – if the pack of cigarettes and the five in the morning routine are the same mechanism running in different directions – then something has to distinguish them, and it cannot just be “good goals”.
Everyone believes their goals are good, so that answer makes discipline merely instrumental and hands the whole question off to somewhere else.
The test I have landed on is simple: judge a repetition by what it leaves of your capacity to choose next time.
Do not judge it by whether it is pleasant, or whether it is productive in the sense that word usually gets used. Judge it by whether the person on the other side retains more capacity to choose deliberately, or has become more compelled by the pattern itself. Freedom can turn the screw in either direction, but every turn changes how much freedom the next turn will require, and how much remains available.
The cigarettes narrowed choices, and not in a metaphorical sense; the money spent on them was gone, in a way that was decided before the week started, and every pack made the next one less optional than the last. That is the thread.
Avoidance narrows: relief now in exchange for a slightly smaller range of things you are able to face later. Resentment also narrows, though in a particularly cruel way, because it eventually requires the injury to keep existing; it needs the wound maintained in order to go on being what it is.
And on the other side: a skill widens, as do savings. Honesty, chosen intentionally, widens, because a person who does not have to remember what they said has more of their attention available for everything else. Trust widens, both what you extend and what you are given.
But the test only earns its keep when you turn it on the flattering cases.
Diligence past a certain point narrows. The person who cannot stop working has not achieved a more advanced form of work ethic; they have lost the option of rest that they used to have. Asceticism narrows. Restraint carried far enough becomes an inability to receive anything, which is not a higher form of restraint but a smaller life wearing its costume.
A virtue practiced until it is no longer chosen has crossed over to the same side of the ledger as the vice, and by this test I do not think it deserves any special protection for having started out well.
I learned some of this in the Navy, which is an institution that will supply you with discipline whether or not you have any. You get up at a certain time. You are somewhere at a certain time. The standard exists independently of your opinion about it, and the consequences for departing from it are immediate and impersonal. That is a thread, and it cuts, and it built things in me that I will always have.
But it was not mine in the same way the certifications are. It was cut by someone else. And that is a genuinely different thing, even though the platform it produces looks identical from outside.
The test came later, on the first ordinary morning when nobody was going to notice either way. Imposed discipline can build capability without necessarily building the part that chooses; what you keep after the external structure is removed is the part that became yours.
What I kept was waking before 0600, including on weekends, and a refusal to let anything I am responsible for fail. What I did not keep, and dropped so fast it barely required a decision, was caring in the slightest about how a bed is made.
The split was not where I would have guessed. The bed had a rationale attached to it: attention to detail, standards under pressure, the whole argument. Still, the rationale did not survive a week of nobody checking. Waking before 0600 has no rationale at all. On a Saturday morning, nothing is scheduled and nobody is waiting. It stayed anyway, and it is the one I would have bet against.
The Bill
Before we finish this line of thought, there is a version of this argument spoken more often, and it is wrong in a way that matters.
People say that improvement fights entropy. That decay is the natural direction, that the universe is sloped downward, and that to build anything is to push against physics itself. It is a satisfying thing to say, but it is not true.
Order increases locally all the time; in every plant, every crystal, and every city. What the second law tells you is not that local order is doomed.
It tells you that order has a price, and the price gets paid somewhere.
Decline is not more natural than growth, only cheaper. And when despair says the universe is against you, the honest reply is not that you must heroically resist the cosmos. The honest reply is that order requires payment, and reality does not promise that the price will remain affordable.
Two things follow, and they are both things I will not claim.
The first: you do not control the gradient you exist on. What you control is the direction you push. There is a version of everything I have written here that turns into a promise: keep turning and the terrain will change, be consistent and it will compound.
I do not believe that promise and I will not make it.
Some terrain does not move. Illness does not negotiate. Neither does age, or the market, or the particular circumstances a person happens to be standing in at any given moment. There are people who cut a thread faithfully for thirty years and got nothing for it, and they were not doing it incorrectly. The compounding story is borrowed from finance and it flatters, but an essay that guarantees a return on character is a prosperity gospel with better vocabulary.
What is actually in your hands is which way you are pushing. That is all that can be guaranteed.
The second: I am not the success story here.
I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. I now vape, which means the same molecule arrives on roughly the same schedule by a route that nobody scolds me for. The thread was not cut.
And a day without caffeine is not meaningfully better than the few weeks when I genuinely could not afford a pack. I know exactly what that day feels like. I have arranged my life so that it does not happen.
Even now, when my wife buys a pack of cigarettes while traveling, stressed, or both, I pick on her about it. Not cruelly, but enough, and not entirely out of concern. Some part of me takes pleasure in standing on the technically correct side of a line, even when the line is available to me only because my version of the habit happens to be the kind that doesn’t smell.
Run that through the test I proposed a page ago. Does it widen anything?
It does not. It costs her something and costs me nothing, which is the reliable signature of a virtue that isn’t one. It makes me a person she has to manage on the way back from the airport. That, to me, is a less defensible thread than the nicotine itself.
So no, I did not climb out. I found an exit that let me keep most of what I had and lose the part that was socially expensive, and let the change be taken as a credential.
The shape this essay wants to take at the end is the shape where discipline conquers the thread, and I do not think I get to write that.
What I actually believe is smaller.
The platform built by everything you did yesterday will hold today’s choice, but it will not make it. There is no magical revolution after which the thing runs by itself, and no amount of accumulated structure that ever relieves you of showing up. Maintenance is also a cycle. The order you built is temporary and it stays only as long as something keeps entering the mechanism.
The turning does not stop; it was never going to. All any of us get is a say in what the thread is fastening us to, and that say has to be given again tomorrow.
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