Vaping Makes You Unfuckable

There’s this fake government PSA floating around about vaping that just kills me. It’s got this serious deadpan warning that e-cigarettes reduce your attractiveness by sixty percent. Not your lung function. Not your wallet. Your sex appeal. The consequences are loneliness, isolation, and sexual frustration. It’s obviously a comedy bit from some German sketch group, but the execution is perfect.

The genius of it is that it doesn’t mess with health facts or aesthetics. It goes straight to the one thing that actually matters. You’re going to be alone. You’re going to be horny. That’s it. That’s the pitch.

And yeah, there’s something true in there. Nobody’s ever looked at someone with a massive cloud machine in their mouth and thought okay, I’m definitely fucking that guy. But you already know that. Everyone knows it. The PSA just says it out loud in the most official-sounding voice possible.

I showed this to a friend who vapes once. He laughed and took another hit. You can’t really convince someone to stop once they’ve decided to own it. The awkwardness is baked in by that point, and paradoxically, that’s kind of the whole appeal. There’s a defiance to it. A commitment to the bit.

This is how internet trends work. Something dumb shows up, people make fun of it relentlessly, the jokes get weirder and weirder, but nobody stops doing the thing. Then a new dumb thing comes along and everyone forgets the old one existed. Vaping will disappear the same way eventually. We’ll just stop caring and move on to the next thing.