How a Soul 2, a nearly clear Laplandia and one well-judged mix helped me take a habit apart piece by piece.
18+. A personal account, not advice and not advertising: nothing mentioned here was paid for. Nicotine is harmful and addictive in any form.
I smoked around a pack and a half a day.
At some point that stops registering as “I smoke sometimes.”
The cigarette becomes punctuation.
Woke up.
Lit one.
Finished a task.
Lit one.
Got stuck.
Lit one.
Left the house, arrived somewhere, talked to someone, thought something over, got angry, got tired.
An enormous number of completely different events gradually acquire the same small ending.
Which is why the very idea of “just quitting” struck me for a long time as suspiciously simple.
Because what exactly was I supposed to quit?
The nicotine?
The taste?
The motion of the hand?
Five minutes of quiet?
An excuse to step outside?
A way to put a full stop after work?
The habit of filling a pause with something?
The cigarette had long since stopped being one object.
It was a small system.
And I unexpectedly discovered that a system does not have to be destroyed all at once.
Sometimes you can take it apart first.
Not a vape review
I got a GeekVape Soul 2.
I bought it separately, at one of the shops in Ulyanovsk.
And I am deliberately not going to write a proper review of the Soul 2 here.
I want to use it properly first, and then write about the device separately: the 1.0 Ω pod, my 9 watts, battery life, consumption, leaks, how long pods last, and the part that interests me most — whether a thing like this suits someone arriving not from the world of vaping but from ordinary cigarettes.
A separate Soul 2 review will come later.
For this story you need to know far less about the device.
I did not want a new technological fetish.
I did not want enormous clouds, a collection of devices and a new hobby where within a week you start discussing coil resistance with the expression of a turbine plant engineer.
I needed one very simple function:
pick it up → take a drag → put it back down.
The Soul 2 is only a tool here. I will take it apart properly after a longer stretch of use.
Right now I have a 1.0 Ω pod at around 9 watts.
I did not derive nine watts in a laboratory.
That setting simply gives me enough of the sensation I was looking for.
And the device gradually stopped demanding attention.
Which is probably the best compliment a tool can get.
Good technology should, at some point, disappear a little.
It solved the problem.
Now go live.
But one problem turned up with the device itself.
It replaces the form of the cigarette.
It does not tell you what to put inside it.
And this is where the far more interesting part began.
I want tobacco. Not an ashtray
I wanted a tobacco taste.
You would think the request could not be simpler.
But “tobacco flavour” in liquids turned out to be a philosophical genre of its own.
Some mixes drift into sweetness.
Others into nuts.
Others still resemble baked goods that once stood near a pack of cigarettes.
Fruit I did not want at all.
I had no need to turn a cigarette into a watermelon lozenge and solemnly declare the problem solved.
But a realistic imitation of an ashtray would have been a fairly strange goal too.
I was looking for something in between.
Tobacco still recognisable.
The cigarette no longer.
The liquid was mixed for me at one of the local vape shops in Ulyanovsk. I came in with a fairly simple request: “I want tobacco, but not an ashtray.”
They put together a 50/50 base, around 10 mg of nicotine and the Laplandia flavour profile. And that is where they landed it, unexpectedly, exactly right.
Laplandia
The taste is dark. The liquid itself is nearly clear. For some reason that combination is the one I like most.
If you lay the Laplandia profile out in words, it goes roughly like this:
tobacco;
dark chocolate;
caramel.
On paper that sounds fairly sweet.
In practice it came out differently for me.
Tobacco stays as the frame.
That matters.
The brain still gets something from familiar territory and does not have to work out why, after years of cigarettes, it has suddenly been handed tropical lemonade.
But from there the difference begins.
No paper.
No ash.
None of that characteristic aftertaste of a recently extinguished cigarette.
Dark chocolate makes the taste deeper.
Caramel rounds it off a little.
And you end up at a strange intermediate point.
Laplandia does not try to be a cigarette.
And that, it seems, is exactly why the cigarette gradually became unnecessary beside it.
The familiar, without having to go back
That was probably the central mistake in how I used to think about habits.
I thought in binaries.
Either you smoke.
Or you don’t.
Either you’re dependent.
Or you’re free.
But human habits sit badly inside a true / false switch.
In whatever harms or hinders a person there is almost always some function, and that function is why they keep doing it.
Otherwise the matter would resolve itself quite easily.
What I needed from a cigarette was obviously not only nicotine.
I liked the completeness of the action.
Step outside.
Light one.
For a few minutes nothing is required of you.
Come back.
The cigarette created a small border between two stretches of the day.
I might not even have noticed it.
But the border was there.
The vape kept part of that mechanism.
And the tobacco taste kept part of the sensory habit.
While both were already sufficiently different.
The result was not a perfect new world.
The result was a bridge.
And a bridge does not have to be a place where you intend to spend the rest of your life.
Its job is simpler.
To get you across, once.
Clear
There is one more detail of my mix that I unexpectedly came to like on its own.
The liquid is nearly clear.
Not amber.
Not dark brown.
It does not look like the contents of an oak barrel kept by three generations of a family for some great tobacco ritual.
An almost transparent base.
And the taste stays dark all the same.
With the way I use it, a pod lasts a fairly long time.
I am not going to turn that observation into a law of chemistry. I do not have two identical devices, a control group and a laboratory where twenty pods died heroically for science.
But for me personally the combination worked out nicely:
I use the device a lot,
the liquid stays light,
and the pod shows no desire to depart for the next world just yet.
I even like the contrast itself.
A tobacco taste does not have to be brown.
For some reason manufacturers of everything on earth like making a product resemble our idea of its taste.
Strawberry should be pink.
Mint green.
Tobacco brown.
But the tongue cannot see colour.
And as far as I can judge from experience, the coil is equally indifferent to the aesthetics of packaging.
I still use nicotine
This is where a stop is mandatory.
I have not stopped using nicotine.
So this is not a text titled:
HOW I HEALED COMPLETELY IN THREE DAYS
I do not have that text.
And I am not about to turn one successful stage into the biography of a patron saint of willpower.
I simply replaced cigarettes with another form of nicotine consumption.
This is not the end point.
And I understand the difference perfectly well.
But something else important happened for me.
The cigarette stopped being the only available answer to the urge to smoke.
Before:
urge → cigarette.
Now:
urge → there is a choice.
It seems like a small change.
But small changes are sometimes exactly what breaks very long cycles.
The first day
And then a day went by.
A whole one.
I did not smoke a single cigarette.
For someone who could previously get through around a pack and a half in a day, that is a fairly strange moment.
And I had not staged an experiment.
I did not set a date.
I did not solemnly throw out the last pack to music.
I did not write myself a pledge.
I simply noticed, in the evening:
there were no cigarettes today.
And the most unexpected part was not even the count.
I liked how I felt.
There was no sense of having hauled an enormous prohibition around all day.
The cigarette did not have to be defeated every minute.
It simply was not needed.
For a second a very simple feeling appeared:
so it can be done this way too.
Sometimes that is already enough for the next day to start a little differently.
I did not quit smoking
That is why the title of this piece is what it is.
I do not want to say “I quit” yet.
First, it is too early.
Second, that phrasing describes what happened rather badly.
What I started doing was taking smoking apart into functions.
Nicotine.
Tobacco taste.
The motion of the hand.
The pause.
Stepping outside.
Switching between tasks.
The reward.
Five minutes of quiet.
The habit of ending an event with one specific action.
And it unexpectedly turned out that
they are not obliged to live inside one cigarette forever.
You can replace one function.
Then another.
Leave something for now.
Take something away.
See what happens.
Unheroic.
But far more interesting than yet another war between a person and himself.
Why substitution worked at all
There is a popular image of change.
You understood.
You gathered your will.
You refused.
You began a new life.
A very handsome plot.
Especially once everything has already worked out.
From inside the process it looks worse.
A habit repeated thousands of times has time to embed itself in far too many situations.
So the phrase “just don’t do it” sometimes means:
take twenty different functions and leave all of them unreplaced at once.
And then be surprised that body and head object.
A different approach turned out to suit me better.
The same one I like in working with systems generally:
first understand what this thing actually does.
Then change it.
If an old process has existed for years, it may well be serving something.
Even if it serves it terribly.
I did not want to become a vaper
This matters too.
I am not especially interested in a new identity.
I do not want to swap the label:
SMOKER
for:
VAPER.
That would look like a government reform where a ministry is renamed and the system solemnly declared new.
For me the vape right now is more of a transition tool.
Maybe there will be less nicotine later.
Maybe less use.
Maybe a different form.
Maybe one day the device will not be needed at all.
I don’t know.
And for the first time it seems fine to me not to know the next stage.
You do not have to decide today on behalf of the person you will be in a year.
For now you can simply not buy cigarettes.
Money
There is another aspect, considerably less romantic.
Cost.
Cigarettes used to go very fast.
At a pack and a half a day the regularity of the spending becomes almost invisible precisely because you are paying constantly.
A hundred roubles here.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And the habit gradually turns into a subscription that nobody, for some reason, ever shows you as a single monthly figure.
The liquid lasts me a long time, and month over month it works out noticeably cheaper.
I am not going to build a universal economic model here: people vape at wildly different rates, devices consume differently, pods cost money too.
But for me personally the difference came out noticeable enough to become one more argument.
Not the loftiest one.
But an effective one.
Humanity spent millennia searching for great grounds on which to change a life.
Sometimes it all ends with a spending table.
The taste mattered more than the device
And this is probably the main everyday discovery of the whole story.
I initially thought the device would be the key.
Choose the right vape.
The right pod.
The right wattage.
But the device fairly quickly became just a piece of hardware.
Whereas the taste determined whether I wanted to come back to that hardware instead of a cigarette.
And here my particular Laplandia mix landed on a strangely precise point.
The tobacco stayed.
The cigarette left.
That, I think, is what good substitution is:
keep enough of the familiar that the transition does not feel like punishment, and enough of the new that going back stops being appealing.
What next
I will write about the GeekVape Soul 2 itself separately.
Not now.
First I want to accumulate real experience rather than publish a “review after two evenings,” where half the specifications are copied off the box and the author has not yet had time to break the other half.
I want to test it in ordinary life.
How long pods actually last.
What happens to the battery.
Whether leaks appear.
How the 1.0 Ω behaves.
Whether I stay at 9 watts.
Whether what I like now starts to irritate me in a month.
And most importantly:
whether this form can be recommended to someone who wants to leave the cigarette ritual specifically, rather than enter vaping culture.
Then it will be a proper review.
For now the Soul 2 is only one object in a larger story.
I thought smoking sat inside the nicotine.
Then it turned out it also sits in the taste.
In routes.
In gestures.
In time.
In how a conversation ends.
In what you do after eating.
In the five minutes between two tasks.
In dozens of small places where the cigarette embedded itself so long ago that it already seems part of you.
So I did not defeat it.
I started pulling it out of there one function at a time.
So far it looks fairly simple:
a white Soul 2,
1.0 Ω,
9 watts,
a nearly clear liquid,
tobacco, a little dark chocolate and caramel,
a well-judged mix from a vape shop in Ulyanovsk,
and one evening when I suddenly realised:
I did not smoke a single cigarette today.
The next day the world looked exactly the same.
It is just that one small system inside it was already working differently.