Vices.

Your first breath was free.

Nobody sold it to you. Now look at what you are pulling into your lungs hundreds of times a day: heated solvents, sweet flavourings nobody has properly tested in human lungs, and tiny particles of metal from the coil that heats it all. Your lungs were built for air. You are feeding them chemistry.

Young people who vape report more wheezing, more coughing and more shortness of breath than those who don’t. That much has already been measured. What nobody can tell you is what fifteen years of it will do, because high-strength disposables haven’t been around that long. You are the experiment.

“It’s safer than smoking.” Yes, and that’s a low bar. If you never smoked, your choice was never vapes or cigarettes. It was vapes or clean air.

And it’s built to keep you. In most disposables the nicotine comes as salts that make it smooth, so your throat no longer stops you. You take in far more, far more often, without noticing. Within hours it fades, and your body starts asking for more. Much of what you call stress is that asking. The next pull answers it, the relief is real, and you decide the vape calms you down. What it calms is the need it created. You’ve hired the arsonist to put out the fire.

The way back

• Pick a day and bin it. All of it, including the spare in the car.
• The first three days are the worst. A craving lasts a few minutes and passes, even if you do nothing.
• When it hits, breathe: ten slow breaths, all the way out. Part of what calmed you was always the breath. Keep that. Drop the vape.
• Give it two to four weeks. The restlessness fades.

Self-mastery starts with your breath. Take it back.

It makes doing nothing feel fine.

That’s the whole trap. Boredom is a signal. It’s Life telling you to get up and go after something. Weed switches the signal off. The plan you had at nineteen is still a plan at twenty-four, and the couch knows your shape.

And you don’t know what you are smoking. The weed sold now is bred far stronger than it was a generation ago. Products sold as cannabis in Ireland, from jellies to vapes, have been found to contain synthetic cannabinoids: lab-made chemicals far more dangerous than THC. People have ended up in hospital. A dealer’s bag comes with no label and no lab test.

People who smoke high-strength weed every day have been found to be about five times more likely to develop psychosis. I know where that road goes. I told you at the top of this page. If you are hearing things, feeling watched, or the paranoia stays after the high is gone, stop now. That is your mind telling you it has had enough. Listen to it.

If you’re a man, here’s one nobody mentions when the joint’s going round. In a study of over a thousand young Danish men, those who smoked more than once a week had sperm counts more than a quarter lower.

And it’s still illegal here. The Garda know me well, remember? A drug conviction can close doors you haven’t even knocked on yet: jobs, travel, a J1.

Now the good news. Your body already makes its own cannabinoids. One of them is called anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for bliss, and a hard run raises it. What you are buying is a crude copy of something you were born able to make.

The way back

• Bin the stash and the gear. Delete the number.
• Expect a rough week or two: bad sleep, wild dreams, a short fuse, no appetite. That’s withdrawal, not proof you need it. It passes.
• Fill your evenings before they fill themselves: training, a class, people who don’t smoke.
• Notice what comes up when the smoke clears. That feeling is what you have been medicating. It is also where your direction is hiding.

Make your own highs. You were built for it.

You pay at the door to be ignored.

You queue in the cold. You pay a stranger to let you into a dark room. Then you pay again for every drink. Say it out loud and it sounds like a punishment.

The whole thing is sold on a promise: somewhere in there is a potential female friend, and maybe tonight is the night. Then look at the room. Too loud to talk, too dark to see a face, too drunk to remember a name. You can stand beside two hundred people and meet none of them. It’s fake bullshit, and part of you already knows it.

The music is mostly shit. The atmosphere isn’t even good. And the volume isn’t for you. When researchers turned the music up in two bars, young men drank more and drank faster: 3.4 drinks instead of 2.6, each one finished sooner. The club knows. That ringing in your ears on the way home is damage, not atmosphere.

And in the toilets, someone is selling a better night in a little bag. It isn’t a better night. It’s a worse week.

That’s what I mean by complete self-disrespect: paying to be deafened, ignored and overcharged, then calling it a good night because everyone else does.

The way back

• If you love music, go where the music is real: a gig, a trad session, a band you would cross the country to see.
• If you want to meet someone, go where people are doing something: the GAA club, the gym, a class, a cause. People are easier to meet when they are being themselves. Nobody is themselves at 2am in a nightclub.
• Count what one night really costs: the money, the sleep, the Sunday you lose. Then decide what it’s worth.

Respect yourself enough to spend your nights on something real.

Some pints are culture. Some are painkillers.

A few drinks with your friends in the local is Irish culture. It’s understood and it’s respected. If you are going to have something, a pint with people you love beats a joint alone in your room or a bag in a club toilet. And the pub was never really about the pint. It was about the people, the talk, the music, the town.

That doesn’t make drink harmless. It isn’t. Alcohol causes at least seven kinds of cancer. Three pints in one go is about sixty grams of alcohol, which the World Health Organization counts as heavy drinking.

Drinking your pain out of you is a different thing. From the outside it looks the same, because a pint is a pint, but you know which one you are having. You drink alone. You drink to sleep. You can’t face people without one. You can’t stop at two. You wake up with the fear.

The fear is part of the trap. Drink calms your nerves tonight and leaves them raw tomorrow. It knocks you out, then wrecks the second half of your sleep, so you wake up tired. So you reach for another to fix what the last one left behind. Same arsonist, different fire.

Your lack of direction and purpose should not be medicated with drink. It’s a question. Answer it.

The way back

• Be aware. For two weeks, write down every drink. Most people are surprised.
• Take a month off. If that sounds easy, it will be. If it sounds impossible, that’s your answer.
• Keep the pub, lose the painkiller. The people are the point. Slow the next one down, or make it a mineral.

Drink with your friends. Never at your life.

The worst man killer out there.

It doesn’t kill you in one go. It takes the drive you were given for Life and empties it into a screen, a few minutes at a time.

Every time, you are coding your brain. You are teaching your body what sex is: a screen, a click, and something newer the moment it gets boring. Your body learns. Then one day there is a real woman in front of you, warm and nervous and real, and your body doesn’t know what to do with her.

That isn’t a scare story. When porn use becomes compulsive, it is linked with erection problems in young, healthy men, and some of them recover when they stop. Researchers are still arguing about how often it happens and why. The men it happens to aren’t arguing. Do you really want that?

And it escalates. There is always a newer clip, a harder scene. Plenty of men end up watching things that used to bore them, or even disgust them. That isn’t you discovering who you are. It’s what you have been fed.

The people on the screen are people, too. You don’t know who they are, what it cost them, or whether they chose to be there. Would you want to be watched that way?

If you can’t stop when you want to, you are not weak. You have been coding your brain one way for years. You can code it another way.

The way back: run your own test

Don’t take my word for it. Reality is talking to you through direct experience, so run the experiment: thirty days with none of it.

• Get it off your phone. Put a blocker on. Charge the phone outside your bedroom.
• Learn your triggers: bored, lonely, stressed, late at night. When one hits, move your body. Train, walk, take a cold shower, call someone.
• Then watch what changes: your energy, your sleep, your focus, the way you look at real people.

You decide what your body learns.