For the most part, that period of time is over.

Smokers are not exactly social outcasts, but many communities have extensive non-smoking laws, and in fact some even limit how close you can be to a building when you are smoking outside. 

Without taking into account the gasoline spent to get in a car and go purchase cigarettes, or taxes, if a pack of cigarettes costs $3.20 (a low estimate) and you smoke a pack a day for ten years, you will have spent $11,680 in that period of time.

What else could you do with that money? If you had saved that amount of money over ten years, even at a fairly low interest rate of 3 percent, you would have had $13,579 in that time.

And the truth of the matter is that most smokers spend even more than that amount of money; once all the things like lighters, matches, gasoline to go get the cigarettes, days and weeks when they smoke more than usual, the brand that they smoke, and so forth, are included.

There is an emotional cost to smoking too. Even the most committed smoker, at a subconscious level, knows that they are doing damage to their body. This almost certainly will affect their self-esteem, since people who value themselves highly in general are not consciously self-destructive. Most smokers know that many non-smokers “hate” the smell of smoke and consider smokers to have a lack of self-control. It is emotionally difficult to know that people look at you as being “out of control” or “a loser,” because you are a smoker – even if you think that belief is wrong or absurd.

At their deepest level, smokers know that continuing to smoke, especially into middle age, increases the possibility that they will end up becoming to some degree “a burden” to their loved ones, since smoking deteriorates physical health to a degree unmatched by anything apart from heavy alcohol or drug abuse. Also, smoking takes time away from people that you care about who don’t smoke, (e.g. a person’s children,) and many smokers have a feelings of guilt about this at some level.

The physical cost of smoking is well documented and extensive. It’s not a matter of opinion. Smoking has been proven to contribute to or cause:

Cigarette smoking is also clinically linked to a shorter lifespan and is considered by some to be the number one preventable cause of early death in the world. The good news is, even if you consider yourself to be hopelessly addicted to nicotine, there are tools such as hypnosis and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) which can help make stopping smoking simpler than you have probably imagined. With the right plan and the right support, millions of people worldwide have faced their addiction to cigarettes and have successfully gotten beyond it. If you want to become one of them, it is possible to do so.

Perhaps becoming very clear about what smoking is costing you is one of the first important steps toward a smoke-free life.