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When I gave up smoking four years ago, it struck me how important smoking had been to my experience of travelling: I no longer had any idea how much time to spend staring at a beautiful view or taking in an atmospheric street scene. One minute? An hour? Ten seconds? It used to be measured in cigarettes. The rapid expansion of coffee culture in the English-speaking world in the 21st century—both of the branded, Starbucks variety, and its hipster, Australasian cousin—can partly be understood as plugging this gap. A dose of caffeine takes longer to administer than one of nicotine, but both provide a staging post, either solitary or social, in a day that is otherwise short of routine.
I once asked an old friend, through a thick haze of smoke, what he liked most about a cigarette, to which he replied, "It frames a moment." In the age of the smartphone, we have developed a more literal way of framing moments: a digital record is made, always with the possibility of being shared. The selfie is the more infamous manifestation of this, putting the taker's narcissism on full public display. Yet this is simply a more brazen version of the banal tweet or status update about one's whereabouts or activity.
