Question 1 of 24
How committed are you to the cigarette lifestyle?
Pick one to continue — the dead don't get to skip homework.
The cigarette, statistically speaking
💀 A grim little fact
Tobacco is the overachiever of the death industry: the World Health Organization pins more than 8 million deaths a year on it. Over 7 million are smokers; another 1.2 million are non-smokers who simply had the misfortune of sharing air with one.
A 2024 University College London study did the grim arithmetic and found a single cigarette shaves off about 20 minutes of life (17 for men, 22 for women). A pack? Roughly seven hours. Smoke a pack a day and you're basically pre-paying rent to Morty.
Tobacco: 8M+ deaths a year, the single most preventable cause of death on Earth.
🔮 Myth vs. Morty
You've heard "every cigarette costs you a minute." Cute — the real figure is closer to twenty. But here's the card the smoking uncle always plays: Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified human ever at 122 years, reportedly smoked for around 96 years and only quit near 117 (allegedly because she was too proud to ask someone to light it).
Morty's ruling: Jeanne is not proof smoking is safe — she's a walking, wheezing lesson in survivorship bias. For every Jeanne, millions of people quietly didn't make it to the punchline.
Sources: WHO; Jackson et al., Addiction (2024) · Entertainment only — not medical advice.