Mubarak Alhassan COM 101 #25640434

According to the New York Times, “a city Room reporter once asked a medical friend
what is the single most important thing about health they learned in medical
school”. “Don’t smoke was the reply.” Even though that may be true, but health
problem as a motivation to quit smoking is not very important to many, and it is
certainly had not been important to me. Bad health to me implies the existence of
disease, and as at now I felt quite healthy, I see no reason why I should be unhealthy
tomorrow or in the future. Furthermore, nicotine withdrawal, to me, is as deadly as
a health risk of smoking. Therefore, I am unlikely to quit smoking because of a risk
of acquiring a disease 20 years later.

You may remember the famous television commercial of Maries’ amputated fingers
that show the gruesome images of Maries' leprosy-like fingers and strange images of
human skeleton with smoke rising sluggishly about neuronal pathway, spinning
with slow motes in a visible spectrum. This represents the slow, but deep pathway
being destroyed by a puff of cigarette inhaled by a smoker, a sinister bone saw and a
mysterious set of clippers.

Interestingly, this commercial was targeting young people’s attitude towards

smoking. The assumption is that people, either young or old, smoke because they do
not know of its health risk. By revealing the extreme health effect of smoking, the
campaign hopes to change my smoking behavior. However, health effects of
smoking are partial cause of my smoking behavior.—I smoke to destroy myself but
only slowly. Moreover, the campaign implies that my smoking behavior can be
related to my wish to be cool. But, I smoke not out of desperation to be cool, or lack
thereof, but out of a natural desperation to be happy in mix of competitive society.
Your first puff came after much early failure to develop that master reading skills
you sought to develop. The cigarette filled a darkening sensation of weakness that
had long been simmering in your mind. It gives you an opportunity to channel your
energy towards a particular feeling that differed from your earlier ones--getting
"As" or wanting to read and write with remarkable supremacy. It is a metaphysical
feeling of sex, alcohol, and smoke that makes you happy and gives you more time to
sleep and dream-a kind of negative definition of effort.

It can be seen that this commercial is unlikely able to modulate my smoking

behavior even if I finally become convinced that smoking substantially augment my
risk of developing health problems. This belief can only have a negligible impact on
my smoking behavior because as I have indicated above, I see no connection,
between attaining superior grades and developing master reading skills with good
health. However, if the commercial, somehow, was able to link smoking behavior to
bad grades, or to inhibition of study efficiency, it would, for me, have an infinite
impact.

However, Maries smoking campaigns can be effective if predicated on the concept of

Pluralistic ignorance, which is the idea that individuals are unable to accurately
judge the social norms. For me, smoking had been just a habit that I choose to
engage. I could not see that smoking was not just bad, but also criminal, ignorant,
associated with low I., Q, preventer of opportunity, and certainly a destroyer of
grades, it was only last fall that I began to make the connection, after making series
of silly errors on my physics exams that I completely mastered. The idea that social
norm is a secret has had a strong influence of my behavior in recent years. Certainly,
there are many who are less concern about opportunity, grades, and so on, but a
social norm have inherent social power that is applicable in several point of view.,
unless smoking is once profession. . Thus, if Marie’s anti-smoking campaign
continues, then it can ultimately build a general network of abhorrence towards
smoking enough to change the invisible attitude towards smoking leading to a
general fascism against it.

That is how I succeeded in quitting smoking when I finally learn that my perceived
norm of smoking was so out of touch with reality that my ego became crushed into
pieces and like a shapeless pieces of driftwoods toss in the ocean with my ego
written on them, I am still struggling to find it again.