People should do a lot of things. They shouldn't smoke and they should work out, but here we are in 2024 where the phillip morris stock has outperformed ibm over the last 5 years and the obesity crisis shows no signs of letting up. Knowing something is bad is the first step of course but clearly not enough to drive a real behavioral change, and we aren't even fully in agreement as a society that social media is harmful like how cigarettes or obesity are known to be harmful.
Pretty much most people I know are college educated and I know a few smokers still. A couple are social smokers who only really smoke while drinking. Only one smokes enough to take smoke breaks at work. Lots of people on vapes and zyn in the office otherwise. Nicotine is still compelling enough on its own and plenty of people actually like the act of smoking a cigarette.
Interesting; I wonder if this is generational? I'm Gen-X, and no one in my age group smokes unless they're lower-class. It seems, from my observation, that the younger generations in the US have actually been taking up smoking a lot more than the people in my age group.
>we aren't even fully in agreement as a society that social media is harmful like how cigarettes or obesity are known to be harmful.
There's more than one society on Earth, so it's hard to say that "society" "knows" that smoking is bad without specifying the society. As an American who lives outside the US, one striking place where the US clearly outperforms peer nations, in my daily experience, is with smoking: Americans just don't smoke any more unless they're poor and uneducated. There's no smoking inside (except bars), there's no smoking within XX feet of business entrances, etc. In the US, smokers have really become pariahs since the 80s and early 90s. Some of that has been undone with the rise of "vaping", but still, if you hang out with college-educated people, you probably won't meet any smokers. It's just not like that in other countries: people of all social classes still smoke. Here in Japan, it's quite common to see some salaryman riding a bicycle while puffing on a cigarette, and many restaurants have smoking areas (usually sealed off with separate ventilation in modern buildings). There's even some old locals-only eateries that have (non-separate) smoking inside. Europe isn't any better.
As for obesity, only truly delusional Americans try to claim that "fat is healthy". All the rest know it isn't, even if they're obese, but the society makes it very hard to not be overweight, mainly because everyone drives cars and doesn't walk.