Posted By: mandymama @ 05/14/2008 3:03:45 PM
Comment: My husband works as a welder in a metal shop. I work in IT in an office. EVERYONE he works with smokes, one person I work with smokes. I smoked while I was going to school but easily was able to quit once starting my job because it was something my coworkers would have looked down on me for doing. My husband is currently in the middle of trying to quit smoking for the 5th time. He finds it very difficult. Even when he does not buy cigarettes (which he has not for 4 weeks now) he is surrounded by them all day. Coworkers offer them to him, they smoke while speaking to him, etc.
There are other differences between us. I grew up in a comfortable household. My dad paid cash for cars, but never bought new, you get the idea. He grew up in a household with 5 siblings. They struggled, his father a farmer and his mom a reporter for the small town paper. My dad, a former smoker, quit smoking when I was 11, his dad still smokes even after having fought and won against cancer. My husband started smoking at 13 with his father after doing hard work on the family farm. I started when I was 18 and left for college and kept it hidden from my father (who would have killed me!).
Mostly, I think it's less his education level and more of the environment he is in and has been in his whole life. He certainly isn't too dumb to understand smoking is bad for him, and it is not his only pleasure in an otherwise unfulfilling life. He is good at his work and enjoys it. He is intelligent and the year and 1/2 he did attend college maintained a 4.0 GPA. He makes more money than I do, nearly double, actually, which is what caused him to quit his college career. We are solidly middle class, live in a suburban middle class neighborhood.
He works with lower class, uneducated individuals all day long, however. It is environment, not education level, not socio-economic status. It's not what you are, it's what you are surrounded by.
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