Why do we do things which we know are bad for us?

Why smoke, drink, eat sugar-filled food, lie in the sun, watch Big Brother, waste time (i.e. watch Big Brother), spend money we don't have, blah blah blah...?

This, the thought I had Thursday night smoking a bit of stuff, - supplied to me by a mate at work who obviously thought I wasn't chilled out enough (and who can blame me with the current redundancy / IT issues / general nonsense and now threat of an office move out of the city centre to fucking Hulme thank you very much!) I turned over the tobacco, flicked a thought back to Canada where the earnest Canadians smoked pure grass joints that knocked you out with one toke because "like, tobacco is just so bad for you..." yeah and I supposed weed is just like a fucking trip to Lourdes.

Anyway, emblazoned on the back of the tobacco pouch: Smoking may cause a slow and painful death. I wonder if anyone has ever ever ever been about to have a fag when they've seen that warning and thought "oh well bugger me I didn't know that, better stop then."

The thing is, if I didn't have the occasional smoke, there would still be a million other things that I do and don't do that could cause a slow and painful death, so picking on just one thing doesn't seem fair really.

But why do we do it? I mused sitting in the window. More of us than not I mean. People who are vice free, live the healthiest lifestyles, do everything they should and nothing they're not supposed to must surely be in the minority (and have very few friends). It's particular to the human animal, I would imagine, this doing stuff that's bad for us. I mean you don't see Dolphins hanging around the marina with fags in their mouths talking about how they got wasted the night before (though admittedly, the cigs would get a bit damp).

But humans seem to regard pleasure as a goal above all else, pain, poverty, ambition... Offer the average person an all expenses night on the town every week with the sex, drink and drugs of thier choice or a lifetime of hard work, rewarding career and healthy body and mind and I'm sure most people would opt for the former - they would in Todmorden anyway.

Perhaps, I mused on Thursday night, we do these things in order to throw into relief the sensible, intelligent, difficult, annoying, healthy things we do - as part reward, part re-balancing. I could't imagine living the kind of lifestyle that, if you followed every piece of advice about how to live a healthy life that was out there, you could have. Watch what I eat, go running, never smoke, drink one glass of red wine a day (just one), stay motivated, stop caring who's out of the BB House next Friday (please let it be that twatt Richard - I mean for fuck's sake - "I'm an older gay man and as such he should be coming to me for advice.") But then I couldn't imagine living a purely self-indulgent hedonistic lifestyle either. Well...

Discuss.