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>Why is this? I've never smoked and I'm a zoomer so I never saw it much in movies, yet smoking somehow just naturally looks cool.

Commanding a smouldering ember at their fingertips. A draw from it, giving life to it that briefly illuminates their face in the dark. The thin curl of faint blue smoke tracing their arm movement.

I have no idea, but it's the biggest problem the anti-smoking groups always faced, is that smoking just always looked cool.

Of course not everyone smoking actually looks cool. Most people don't. But there's always that persistent draw to it that isn't replicated by anything else that just "fits" when the right person in the right context does it.

Decades of movies may have popularized it but think of it in other contexts. If someone just went through a really shit experience (combat, for example, or doing something that required enormous mental and emotional strain), they will want a way to release that stress. If they reach for a bottle it has the connotation of "drinking to forget". If they reach for a joint they have the connotation of "getting high to escape". But a cigarette keeps you fully in your sound mind. It has a sense of acceptance and stoicism and surmounting what happened that doesn't feel like they're trying to mentally check out.

From personal experience it's not even the tobacco that is the stress relief, because the nicotine hit isn't *that* intense. It's really just the therapeutic nature of what I wrote in the first paragraph. It gives you time to collect your thoughts and engage in a predictable rhythmic exercise. People usually leave you alone. You can leave a situation to partake. That is what makes cigarettes addictive, the tobacco has fuck all to do with it.

Fire is always cool and joints don't burn like cigarettes so only one thing really captures that primal essence. Vaping has tons more nicotine but always looks gay. It may literally just be the fire, honestly.

The meme of the "X could be here, I hate X" guy, he doesn't look half as cool if he didn't have the cigarette (if he didn't have the cigarette the meme wouldn't exist at all actually). The Ben Affleck looking exhausted meme, doesn't convey the same feeling as if he didn't have the cigarette. Matthew McConaughey in the True Detective meme...