the drug of the times

on zyns/why i'm quitting

Sometimes it’s not writing block but something else entirely, something you can’t put your finger on it until you’ve looked back in a sort of embarrassed shame. Could be small, mountains, molehills, etc. Could be a collection of small things, mountains can be built out of a hundred thousand molehills. But stress builds. Resentment towards who you’ve been. Sometimes it’s the drugs you’re on. That sounds dramatic. It’s not that dramatic. Ignore me. Everyone’s on something. Mine are different types of nicotine. I love nicotine. I know people trying to quit. I’m quitting Zyns as I write this. It’s going well. As a working adult it becomes harder to look back at bad decisions as they begin to grow stale. Old mistakes are like the avocado you’ve left in your bowl of red and white onions for far too long and now it’s gnarled and cracked with time and stale air. Old mistakes look like how a Zyn begins to taste after an hour.

I barreled through a shift at the restaurant where I work three nights a week for my rent money and money for food, having recently come down with a cold — sometimes a server needs to simply push through: this goes for the restaurant industry at large, I think¹. Some realizations can only be grasped when mindlessly working a job that requires one to become putty, pulled like elastic, multitasking from place to place, stapling bags here and taking orders here. But I enjoy restaurant work. The characters are wonderful and I love having mornings to write things like this. Zyns were nice because it’s a full cloud of nicotine to numb out your anxious mind for a full hour. This is what’s attributed to it by the zeitgeist, an ability to “lock in” or whatever, but this is also its main problem. Zyn is too much a product for its time to feel comfortable with.

I’ve been wondering what exactly happened to my drive? My enthusiasm had dried up since the new year. Packed up. Left for the shore. Everything’s felt greyed out like a chore. This is a rather frightening development in a person’s life. I pretended it was more a consequence of a long and stressful winter and nothing more, until that shift on Tuesday, I realized the gloomy weather for the clouds, I realized it’s been the Zyns.

I’ve been on them since October. As of writing this it’s been three days since I took my last one. During that shift, I removed the half-full tin of Zyns from my pocket and tucked it into a dumpster out back behind the restaurant as I was taking out the garbage, I took a picture on my phone, without really looking back... yes, I took the picture for this post… yes, I planned on writing about it… guilty as charged… But, still, I haven’t gone back to Zyns. I have smoked so many cigarettes. But at least I’m off of Zyns; I’m back to being myself.

///

Now, if you don’t know, Zyns are white nicotine packets that you put in your upper lip and they give a buzz which lingers for well over an hour depending on how long you keep it in place. There’s no tobacco involved, only a pure nicotine wrapped in a (supposedly) natural fiber casing. It’s for chewing tobacco what vaping was for cigarettes, and thus there’s a whole web of messy cultural connotations it’s currently evoking leading from a number of directions to the creation of a seemingly “new type of guy” who belongs to what Max Reed attributes to the “Zyniverse”, a new sphere of online influencers and users who’ve increasingly brought a fratty feeling to online spaces, have spent sometimes thousands on prediction markets for golf, and drove the “hawk tuah” meme to a place where Hailey Welch could be convinced by a gaggle of crypto bros to rugpull her listeners with a crypto scam she herself quite honestly seemed unaware of.

Zyniverse is accurate for what Zyns would become in the cultural imagination in the United States since the pandemic. They’re perfect devices for shutting one’s mind off. How perfectly this fits into the platform culture we’ve developed into. Reed, in his article, claims this group became unified through two big cultural moments, besides the rise of Zyn, those being (1) Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which led to an increase in macho subcultures and fratty degenerates; and (2) the rise of legalized online gambling. None of these things feel particularly considered, do they?

---

Consideration is a running theme here. An important consideration is that the cultural connotations of chewing tobacco carry over into the Zyniverse. There’s a solid skeleton key for understanding this new wave. What vaping was for the 2010s, nicotine pouches are for the 2020s and it’s important to understand why that is and what it means.

In the American taxonomy of tobacco use, chew is held in the popular imagination at the lowest rung in terms of class² and aesthetics, the latter for arguably good reasons (the spit bottles are gross, for one). Middle-class families look on in horror when they see bottles of spit in parking lots or being tossed out the windows of Amazon delivery trucks alongside bottles of urine. But Zyn being a digitalized version of a traditionally blue collar, “low class” nicotine consumption, one which doesn’t require spitting and comes from the same nordic model of product design as IKEA furniture, a whole right-wing ecosystem has quickly grown around it since, as we should know by now, the right-wing media is an instinctive animal when it comes to ignorant populist angst and this newly developed “Zyniverse” encompassed both the right-wing tech scene, frats nationwide, blue collar midwest male voters, the armed forces, and seemingly the entire finance industry all in one sweep. A conservative populist’s wet dream. Joe Rogan and Hasan Piker both attest to it — it’s an influencer’s drug, out of sight and discreet. A symbol of online, “locked in” masculinity that has blossomed into a cultural moment which formed a coalition almost around the drug as a path forward to the white house, now that the overly flavored vapes have begun to gradually disappear from streams and from high schools here we are with its productivity version. Zyns are very much the drug of the 2020s; it’s the drug of the pure streamline. But something about Zyn being a productivity drug makes the whole situation feel uneasy, especially when the packets take on such comfortable candy form.