It's become common at the start of movies and TV shows to show a list of all the various ways the content contained therewithin is inappropriate for children.

You're warned about any stray cursing and sexual activity, violence and self-harm, but the one that always blows me away is the warning about smoking. It's shocking — not because smoking is good for you or because kids should smoke — but because it reminds me that there is no activity that has undergone more of a transformation in the mind of Americans than smoking has.

In the span of my (relatively short, so far) life, smoking's reputation has gone to the dogs. Smoking used to be shorthand for coolness, the most certain way to transmit a character's blase insouciance toward life's harsh realities.

Yes, cigarettes might kill you, the 1980s smoker seemed to say, but so what?

There was a time, earlier than that, even, when heroes smoked — John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart — but by my day, it had been reduced to the domain of bad guys, tough women, teenagers and other rebels.

Though we didn't live in the cloud of smoke that writer Fran Lebowitz said was the norm in her day, there was still plenty of smoking. I remember one TWA flight from New York to Greece as a child where there were so many smokers on board that, upon exiting the plane, my best use would have been topping a bagel with cream cheese.

In the decades since, however, the act of smoking has become so shocking, so beyond the pale that even villains don't do it. Kids in 2023 could be forgiven for thinking that no one in the entire world — hero or villain — smokes. They don't see smoking at restaurants, in offices or even outside, and now they don't see it on TV, either.

I smoked cigarettes myself, for a while, though I did it with aggressive casualness. I never woke up in the morning and smoked a cigarette, and I could go for days or even weeks without one if I felt sick. I quit because smoking wasn't fun enough to risk dying over, and it was too expensive to justify.

But there was something about a cigarette — the deep breathing, I guess — and there are times even now when I occasionally long for a smoke. I felt particularly antsy during the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and threatened to my husband that if things continued in their unhinged fashion, I would drive to the gas station and break decades of abstinence.

I have kids of my own now, though, and that more than anything has kept me from being truly tempted. I remember finding my own father's cigarettes when I was 9 years old. I knew enough to know that they were bad for him, and I nicked the pack from the console of his truck and stuffed them under the seat.

I didn't want him to die, and smoking seemed like the most dangerous thing he could do. When you're young, your parents are majestic, and anything that can bring them down feels like pretty foul stuff.

As an adult, smoking still isn't worth anyone's suffering.

Plus, the destruction of smoking's reputation in this country isn't a mixed bag. As a public health measure, the elimination of public smoking has been a phenomenal success. As a simple reduction in the annoyances we face — seeing cigarette butts everywhere and coming home from bars reeking — it's an improvement as well.

In the end, smoking's metamorphosis is strange but fine. I may notice smoking's absence, but I don't miss it much.

Good riddance to bad habits, I suppose.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Kristaps Solims at Unsplash