Zay, 27, is working the door at the divey Mission bar Horsies, the kind of place where a youngish crowd sports stick-and-poke tattoos and pretends to enjoy natural wine. In his left hand, heavy with silver jewelry, is a thin Capri cigarette. “I like looking incredibly cunty,” he says with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.
He’s in “the industry,” the byword for the waiters, service workers, and sound engineers that keep a city alive after dark. In that world, smoking is a sacrament. Somewhat wistfully, he tells us about the best cigarette of his life. It was a few years back, and he was with his friends surfing in New Zealand. One of them unwrapped his dry bag and pulled out a crumpled pack.
“That might be the most bliss I’ve ever felt,” Zay says, recalling how they lit up on their surfboards with the waves lapping around them, beauty incarnate as a backdrop.
In between pulls, he argues the relevant point: In a world going up in smoke, what difference does lighting one up make? “We have people in our government fucking young kids,” Zay says. “Seems like smoking is the least of the problems.”
He’s hardly the only young person who has picked up a bad habit.
Whether you’re in prison, at a bad backyard DJ set, or on a vomit-specked sidewalk at 2 in the morning, a cigarette is a universal form of currency. For generations, flirtations have been initiated and friendships sparked by the simple act of asking for a light.
Of course, our relationship with smoking has changed drastically over the past few decades. Gen X lit up in bars and restaurants, at work, and at home, coming of age during a time when smoking was socially acceptable and, well, cool. For children of the ’90s, raised on D.A.R.E. assemblies and that terrifying commercial where a woman smokes through a hole in her throat (opens in new tab), cigarettes were illicit and alluring — a pseudo-forbidden fruit to be indulged in after 2.5 drinks or a particularly annoying work day.
A heady combination of nostalgia, soft nihilism, and social media has Gen Z reconsidering lighting up. Although FDA surveys confirm smoking rates have sharply dropped from their mid-century heyday, you don’t have to look far to find a headline hand-wringing over the fact that “Gen Z is trying to make cigarettes cool again (opens in new tab).” Unlike their grandparents, they understand the adverse health impacts — lung cancer, heart disease, death. They just don’t care.
To understand why cigarettes have such a hold on the TikTok generation, The Standard ventured out into the tobacco-scented night to ask smokers why they think friction-maxxing (opens in new tab) nicotine is better than vaping, about the nanny state push to ban smoking at bars, and the highs and lows of being young in San Francisco right now.
For Kate, 26, a queer artist who uses they/them pronouns and lives in a Mission apartment with a bunch of other “bohemian” types, the appeal of smoking cigarettes is, at least in part, aesthetic. “Indie sleaze is back,” they say, citing 2024’s Brat Summer as evidence that last night’s eyeliner and a pack of Marlboros are glamorous again.
Like most adults under 30, Kate possesses a sense of youthful invulnerability. Serious health consequences only happen to other people. “I’m not going to concern myself with something that might kill me in 20 years,” they say. Besides, they’re just a social smoker; how damaging can a twice-monthly cigarette really be? When asked about their preferred brand, a coy smile spreads across their face. “I’m kind of a princess. I don’t buy my own.”
Carlie, 22, has been smoking “on and off” since she was 16. She exudes an air of self-assured cool, wearing a stiff cotton overshirt adorned with buttons and pins. A small red one reads “I heart Muni.” She has a strong opinion about the possibility of the city taking away her ability to light up outside the bar: “Fuck the ban,” she spits between drags. She’s planning to attend a rally against the proposed ordinance at City Hall.
She knows it’s bad for her, but she’s not embarrassed about being a smoker. (“I sent a selfie smoking a cigarette to the group chat at 8 a.m.” she says to underscore the point.) It’s a vice, but it’s also the one she feels “the least bad about.” Her logic is simple, if not exactly scientifically sound: Smoking isn’t as bad as drinking because you’re more likely to do it in moderation. During a night out, she might have a half dozen drinks. But she usually only smokes half a cigarette — American Spirit Light Blue, preferably — at a time.
Vaping, she says, is “the worst.” There’s no community in it, she says, as a cigarette dangles between her cherry red nails. You don’t have to step outside and share a lighter. There’s no ritual to ripping a matcha Flum after your shift. “Cigarettes are the most authentic way of consuming nicotine.”
A few yards behind her on the sidewalk, a duo of guys is heading down the block to their next destination, passing a man holding a lit cigarette. One of them asks him for a light. “Enjoy your night,” he says to the stranger, handing back the black Bic.
The rumors that Gen Z has taken over the 78-year-old North Beach landmark Vesuvio (opens in new tab) are obviously true. Under the harsh light of a bright street lamp, dozens of young adults sit at small round tables scattered around Jack Kerouac Alley. Others lean against a giant mural decorating the side of City Lights Books.
Camille, 26, sits at a table littered with the debris of a well-rounded night out: a deck of cards, two half-eaten ramekins of salsa, three empty plastic cups of beer, and a half dozen cigarette butts. No ashtray in sight. Her leg bobs restlessly as she considers why her generation has embraced cigarettes. “It’s a vibe,” she concludes, reminiscing about when she smoked her first. (Age 20, in Europe. She still prefers hand-rolling loose tobacco.) Plus, it gives you something to do with your hands besides taking out your phone.
A group of 24-year-olds sits at one of the stained teal metal tables, plastic cups of beer stacked as high as the midpoint of a Rage Cage game. Three of the group greedily pass around a single Marlboro light. One demurs, saying he prefers ketamine.
The group agrees that sucking on a cigarette is better than using a Geek Bar vape as an adult pacifier, particularly if you don’t smoke them regularly. (E-cigarettes are generally thought to be less harmful than conventional cigarettes.) After all, one jokes, a cigarette is basically a “vintage vape.”
Katie is visiting her friends from Seattle. She has an easy smile, a denim jacket, and a deep sense of nostalgia for a before time she’s never experienced. “Our generation is grasping for the past a little bit,” she says. It comes across in their second-hand Y2K-style clothing, half-full packs of cigarettes, and an air of cynicism that feels simultaneously weathered and unearned.
Sometimes, Katie and her friends like to “go ’90s” leaving their phones behind at home in order to be more present with each other. They politely listen as “an unc” tells them about the heady early days of Facebook in the 2010s. They agree their generation is more defeated, and it’s partly because their political consciousness dates to the 2016 election — “Our 9/11,” one says. The rest nod.
“We can’t live in fear,” her friend Ken says, in a late-night attempt to rally the troops for another cigarette or a second location. “My parents got to smoke inside bars, and the generation before that got to smoke wherever they wanted.”
By midnight, the scene outside Cow Hollow’s Balboa Cafe has devolved into low simmering chaos. As tight knots of 20-somethings linger on the sidewalk, swaying slightly as they talk and smoke, an increasingly exasperated security guard attempts to prevent would-be smokers from taking their drinks outside.
She steps in front of a duo who swear they just want to go out one door so they can come back inside another. “We did it last night,” they protest cockily. She confiscates their espresso martinis and dumps them in a bush.
One curly-haired patron, notably without a cigarette in hand, annoyingly needles us about politics in the way men in their early 20s on stimulants tend to do. His roommate, Andy, 24, is shockingly articulate for someone whose pupils are as big as black saucers. He’s the son of two professors and arrived in San Francisco a little more than a year ago to work as a software engineer for a big tech company. He estimates this is the 20th cigarette he’s ever smoked. He holds it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger like a stylus.
Adults have long told Gen Z that they are “the people who are going to save the world,” he theorizes. For a while, he believed it. Now, he thinks the record levels of anxiety among his peers are symptoms of the “powerlessness we feel in the face of war, secret police, and AI.”
The philosophizing goes on for about as long as it takes for a Marlboro Light to burn down to the filter. He considers flicking it into the street, then thinks twice.
“I don’t like to litter,” he says. Alex’s tone is sheepish, a sideways glance to the futility of individual action in the face of collective carelessness. Maybe by the time he lights up cigarette number 30, he’d simply let the detritus fall on the sidewalk.
But tonight at least, he stashes the butt and walks away, a bit of ashen hope for the future in his front pocket.
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