Filtered Rebellion

Temporary rebellion, aesthetic exception, and other lies we tell ourselves.

You hear it in the hazy blur of a house party, half-shouted over a Spotify queue of Charli XCX and Bad Bunny. You see it on Instagram stories—someone holding a Parliament with the same poise they use for martinis and phone-flash selfies. And you read it, again and again:

“Drunk cigarettes don’t count.”

It’s a joke, but not really. It’s a mantra, a loophole, a loophole inside a joke. A half-truth that Gen Z—the generation taught to fear cigarettes like arsenic—recites to ourselves after a night of cheap wine and chain-smoking on a patio we can’t remember.

This isn’t about addiction. Or at least, not in the straightforward, pack-a-day, Marlboro-reds-tucked-in-the-sleeve way of generations past. Most of us don’t smoke. We vape in secret or not at all. We learned early that cigarettes give you cancer, make your teeth yellow, wrinkle your skin. Our PSAs had grayscale lungs and time-lapse deaths. Smoking was old-world, like landlines or Boomer divorces where no one talked about their feelings, just who got the dog.

And yet—under the influence of alcohol, something shifts. That moral clarity crafted by clean girl aesthetics and self-care mantras fogs. The health facts fade. And suddenly, the cigarette—its precise, tactile choreography (the tap of the pack, flick of the lighter, drag, exhale)—becomes irresistible.

We don’t buy packs. We bum cigarettes off whoever’s nearby. We don’t inhale, not really. We just smoke when we’re drunk. And the next day, we tweet our way through the regret:

"me: i quit smoking. also me: drunk and asking strangers for a cig like it’s my birthright"

"drunk cigarettes don’t count. sorry i don’t make the rules."

But beneath the irony is something worth analyzing. Why does this ritual persist—and even flourish—among a generation that otherwise rejects smoking? What cultural work does the drunk cigarette perform?

A 2022 study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research analyzed over 78,000 tweets and found that a staggering 75% expressed positive sentiment toward the co-use of alcohol and tobacco. The data suggested that even self-identified non-smokers were more likely to crave, use, or relapse while intoxicated. The language used was confessional and often conflicted: “Why… do i love cigarettes when i’m drunk?... cigarettes taste horrible and the smell of them makes me sick when i’m sober, but when i’m drunk i could smoke a pack.”[1]

This isn’t about nicotine dependence. It’s about permission. The kind of rule-breaking that’s forgivable because it looks good—aesthetic exception.

The drunk cigarette, in its current form, is an artistic contradiction. Something toxic made romantic, still cool despite everything we’ve been taught. It’s a vibe—filtered in low light, cropped with care. A performance of rebellion that ends the moment the Uber drops us off at our dorms, where our humidifiers and half-full Stanleys wait.

But what makes the drunk cigarette so alluring isn’t just its aesthetic edge—it’s the sense of risk it implies in a generation allergic to consequences. Gen Z came of age amid social surveillance, curated identities, and wellness culture sold as morality. We track our steps, count our calories, journal our feelings, and consume everything—content, people, pills—with optimized intent. In that world, the cigarette offers something we rarely allow ourselves: an unstrategic choice. A single moment of bodily disregard. It’s not just about being seen—it’s about being uncareful. It says: look at me ruining myself a little, just for tonight.

And there’s a performative layer to this: many of these moments are made to be seen. The pose with the cigarette becomes a kind of social media theatre—nostalgic, glamorous, disheveled chic. It’s the opposite of the vape pen, which is furtive and sterile. The cigarette is all edge. A little fire, a little ash—just enough to romanticize.

And then it disappears. The cigarette stub gets flicked into the street. The photo gets deleted or buried in a photo dump. The rebellion is no longer about sustained damage—it’s about the visual punctuation of the night. Perform it, post it, let it expire, move on. We don’t want the consequences, just the moment. In a way, it’s the perfect rebellion for the platform era: brief, visible, and deniable.

It doesn’t count. That’s what we say. That’s what we keep saying. But our lungs don’t care about the lighting.

---

A few years ago, I spent a summer in Taipei. Before that, I thought I knew what cigarette culture looked like: a few grungy friends huddled on a fire escape, one guy who always carried a pack of American Spirits like a cursed talisman. But Taiwan? Whole different story.

There, cigarettes weren’t ironic or performative. They weren’t statements or scandals. They were normal.

Men smoked while waiting for the subway. Women smoked while walking to dinner. In bars, the air was thick with it. Some clubs even let you smoke inside, the ceiling fans whirring hopelessly against the haze. My first night out, I was shocked to see people lighting up with the same casualness I reserved for checking my phone.

Nobody hid it or posted about it. Nobody called it “gross.” There was no anxious preamble—no “I only smoke when I’m drunk” caveat. They just smoked.

What struck me most wasn’t the volume of it—it was the lack of shame. In Taipei, there was no narrative or exceptions made. Just smoke.

Among young people, cigarettes weren’t a guilty pleasure. They were a default. Vapes existed, technically, but rarely appeared in social settings. The cigarette had cultural primacy. It was classic. It was real. You could roll it between your fingers, tap it on a table, crush it under your heel—no performance, no second thought. The vaporizer had none of this drama—it was all technology, no ritual.

I remember standing on a rooftop in Xinyi, holding a cigarette someone had handed me, watching couples pose for photos in matching outfits. I felt like I’d stumbled into a timeline where the moral panic around cigarettes never happened. There was something weirdly soothing about it. And something deeply unsettling.

Because the truth is, I liked it.

I liked the way it made me feel unburdened, momentarily un-modern. Like I could shed the weight of every health class video I’d ever watched, every sanitized PSA, every lecture about how Gen Z was going to be the first “smoke-free generation.” The cigarette wasn’t a vice—it was just another accessory. Like eyeliner. Like a pair of Docs.

And yet: I still called them “drunk cigarettes.” Even there. Even in a country where the cigarette had no need for such disclaimers, I still clung to the script that this wasn’t really me. That it didn’t count.

That reflex feels distinctly Western—and generational. Where older smokers may have absorbed the normalization of smoking and tried to unlearn it, Gen Z is doing the opposite—we were programmed to reject smoking outright, and now we’re carving out exceptions. Self-sabotage enabled by workarounds. Nights off from the self we’re always bettering.

Maybe that’s what makes our version so fragile: we need the framework to make the cigarette feel safe. The rules, the language, the filters—both literal and digital. Back home, it’s a rebellion in disguise, but in Taipei, it was nothing at all. Somewhere between those extremes—performance and habit, guilt and ease—I found myself flicking ash off the edge of a roof, unsure which world I missed more.

We’ve been trained to make everything count. Our 90-minute sleep cycles. Our serotonin. Our skincare routines. In Taipei, the cigarette was simply a part of that lifestyle. But here, it becomes something else. For one night, for one cigarette, we get to be irrational. We get to say: I know this is bad. I’m doing it anyway. We get to slip into the messy, indulgent aesthetic of a self that doesn’t care. A self that knows better, but chooses not to. And there’s something undeniably seductive about that. The moment never lasts, but it doesn’t have to.

Just as the cigarette ends up in the gutter. The Instagram story expires. We delete the evidence, rehydrate, reset.

By morning, we’re fine. Of course we are.

Just don’t check the back pocket of our thrifted jeans, where the lighter we swore we didn’t bring is still warm.

---

[1] Russell, Alex M., Jason B. Colditz, Adam E. Barry, Robert E. Davis, Shelby Shields, Juanybeth M. Ortega, and Brian Primack. "Analyzing Twitter chatter about tobacco use within intoxication-related contexts of alcohol use:“can someone tell me why nicotine is so fire when you’re drunk?”." Nicotine and Tobacco Research 24, no. 8 (2022): 1193-1200.