[...] But the real reason you drink and smoke so much is that you still have the idea, formed somewhere way back when, that smoking and drinking is really a very romantic thing to do. It seems very grown-up to you if you are young, and it seems very youthful to you if you are old.
In his autobiography, Lincoln Steffens describes his romance with drinking:
Once, for example, as I staggered (a little more than I had to) away from the bar, I overheard one man say to another: "Those boys can carry some liquor, can't they?"
That was great. But better still was the other loafer's reply: "Yes," he said, "but it's tough to see young men setting out on the downgrade to hell that way."
The romantic idea that one has a brilliant future somehow being ruined by drinking is natural to a college sophomore, but it ought to be abandoned in maturity. The trouble is that it remains in the subconscious, sneakily invidious, so that even the ugly hangover becomes glamorous. When I was young and seldom got hangovers, or not bad ones, I'd often pretend to be in a very bad way "the morning after." It made for a lot of companionable talk in college about the "hair of the dog" and "getting a quick one." Drugs - which come complete with that great language about "turning on" and "highs" and "freaking out" and "coming down" and so on - must seem equivalently dangerous and romantic. Years and years later, when stupid pride in a hangover was replaced by sensible shame on a number of occasions, when for various reasons I tried to conceal how my hands were trembling, I remember even then having that invidious secret sense of how romantic it was that I was in such a bad way and actually trying to conceal it.
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