If you have a good enough reason, you’ll leave your addiction behind

By David McElroy · March 1, 2022

A friend and I were comparing addictions Tuesday. He’s trying to quit smoking and I’m trying to give up sugar.

My friend started smoking when he was 13 years old — behind his parents’ back, of course — and he’s wanted to give it up for years. But now that he’s 60, he’s seeing serious medical consequences hit him. It’s suddenly become important to quit. He hasn’t had a cigarette for 11 days — and it’s the longest break his lungs have had since he was 13.

I’ve talked before about my ongoing struggle with poor eating. Sugar is my real problem, but it’s far worse because I use food like a drug to self-medicate when I’m feeling down. At some point in January, I suddenly realized I’d been eating well for a few days. It wasn’t a planned thing, but I seized the opportunity, because I know I’m going to kill myself if I don’t make a complete change

Over the last six or seven weeks, I’ve dropped all the sugar and most of the carbs. I’ve felt great and dropped 31 pounds, but I still have a long way to get where I want to go.

My friend and I both have great incentives to kick our habits. But neither of us could compare to the incentive that another friend of mine had. I knew that this friend used to smoke — years ago — and I asked her last week how she quit. It turned out her incentive was her daughter.

When I first met this friend, she smoked heavily. She was married and had two children. I wasn’t around her regularly for awhile, but I kept up with her on Facebook. I watched from afar as her son grew up. And I saw her pride in her daughter, who graduated from college with an engineering degree and has a successful career.

So I asked her last week how she quit smoking — and whether it had been difficult for her.

She said she had really wanted to stop smoking for a long time, but it had seemed too difficult. Her nicotine addiction seemed too strong. But then something happened to give her a reason — and the reason wasn’t about herself.

She and her husband were struggling financially at the time. They owned their own home and made ends meet, but there was nothing left over. Money was tight.

When her daughter was about 12 years old, she and her husband were presented with the reality that the girl needed braces for her teeth. My friend desperately wanted to provide what her daughter needed, but the family simply didn’t have the money.

Then she did some math. She figured up what she was spending on cigarettes — and she realized that she was spending enough every month on her habit that the same amount of money could pay the monthly price of the braces.

So she stopped smoking. Cold turkey. As soon as she made the decision — and had the right reason — she never smoked again.

We can do terrible things to our bodies with our bad decisions. And we can also make positive changes to turn our lives around — when we have the right incentives. When we have the right “why.”

My friend found her “why” and she then found quitting cigarettes to be simple and easy. She didn’t struggle. She wasn’t tempted to start smoking again. All because she could look at the daughter she loved — the one she was doing it for — and know it was worth it.

She said her daughter never knew she quit smoking to pay for her braces, so the daughter can’t appreciate what her mom did. But my friend knows and she doesn’t consider it a big deal. It was just the right thing to do for a little girl who she loved.

Addictions are tough to kick. But all of us are capable of making changes — if we simply have a strong enough reason. It’s great if we can make a change for ourselves, but if we can make a change because we love someone, that’s not so bad, either.

When you find the reason to make a change in your life — the person for whom you want to do it for — scary changes can turn out to be not so scary after all.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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