A Pragmatic Take

There is an old saying, for every cigarette you smoke, you lose one minute of your life. By this saying, if you smoke one cigarette a day you would lose a little over six hours of your life a year. So, roughly every four years you would lose a day of your life.

That sounds reasonable to me, I am willing to take one day of my life at the end, when I am what, seventy, eighty, ninety, or even a hundred to feel some pleasure, I do love my cigarettes after all, but why stop there, one day every four years is not a horrible amount. Two cigarettes would lose me a day every two years, four would lose me a day a year. I am what, twenty-five, so I lose a day a year, and I live till I am eighty, I will lose fifty-five days of my life.

Wait, when I say it like that, it is a month and a half, that is a bit. Then again, that is the end of my life, my friends and family will likely be dead, I will be a bitter old woman who might even hate the youth, what a horrible fate, no I will not be like that, but lowering the amount of time I could be like that is not the worst thing in the world. So, I have decided at most to smoke four cigarettes a day and maybe to lower my intake as I get older, who knows, maybe I will like being old. It would only be when I am old that I will be facing that anyway, fifty-five years is a long time from now.

So, four a day, that is one every six hours, but that doesn’t count sleep. I sleep about six hours a day so that lowers the hours I am awake to eighteen. Eighteen divided by four is four and a half. Let’s see, I wake up at six am, I have one then, then I have one during my lunch break about twelve thirty. I then wait till I get off work, and have one about five o’clock, probably in my car on the way home from work. Finally, around nine thirty, I have my last one. I then go to be at midnight, wait, that is two and a half hours at the end of the night where I won’t have one.

Maybe I should up it to five cigarettes then, let’s see, if I do that it will be, no wait, my math was wrong. I would need to smoke my second cigarette at ten thirty, wow, I was off by a lot. That would then be followed by three and seven thirty. Then the smoking would stop for the night. There is where I add the fifth cigarette before I go to bed, after all, one minute a day is not that horrible.

This also raises the question of my lunch break, I could sneak one out at ten thirty, my work allows smoke breaks, but my lunch break would not have one then, so I add one there as well. So, that is six cigarettes a day. I do that, I lose, let’s see I am going to need a calculator for this, six times three-sixty divided by sixty, thirty-six hours a year. I smoke for my estimated fifty-five years and I come up with one thousand nine hundred and eighty hours, divide that number by twenty-four and I get, eighty-two days. That is over two months.

I will be eighty by then, and probably sickly and an old asshole, so living a slightly shorter time might be for the best. Yeah, I will smoke six cigarettes a day. That is not too many, and I will not kill myself smoking that few.

So, all that in mind, what time is it? Four-thirty, so I am halfway between cigarettes. All this math has made me a bit worried, especially with the thought of losing two minutes at the end of my life.

Oh, what the hell, one cigarette will only cost me a minute, and one minute at the end of my life isn’t that important.