How To Vape On Planes Without Getting Caught
And other general lessons for violating norms in public
If the no smoking sign Is not lit, I guess that means I am good to vape As per federal regulations Which require me To comply with All lighted signs
(Please do not ever actually use this argument if you are caught vaping on a plane someday.1)
I have been vaping on planes for about ten years and have done so on probably about one hundred individual flights. I vape right in my seat while making absolutely no effort to hide my doing so by concealing my vaping. I have never been confronted about this in anyway by any passenger or flight staff. When people learn this, they are often astonished, and that makes me think that they are missing something fundamental about how norms are established and policed. (Needless to say, this all applies to vaping in restaurants and similar other public places as well, but an airplane is the most evocative setting.)
I do in fact make some attempt to hide it which I am usually good at. There is something called “ghosting” which is when you hit a vape and no visible vapor appears in your exhale. The way to do this well is to take a small hit, inhale it deeply, and then exhale a small amount through your nose, then inhale again a small amount through your nose, and again exhale through your nose, until your lungs are approximately empty. If there is a small amount of vapor in your exhale, this is actually fine, as long as you follow the rest of my advice here.
The most important way to avoid getting caught vaping on a plane is to act as if you are doing nothing wrong. In fact, it likely helps that I believe that I am doing nothing wrong, and that anyone who notices me vaping (which definitely happens) can’t help but notice that I am acting like I am doing nothing wrong, and I suspect they also notice that they have not been bothered by my vaping in any tangible way.2 (The vapes I use are odorless.)
How do I act as if I am not doing anything wrong? Well, I just went on a flight with one of my partners who—in part because of her neurospicy social cognition—makes the perfect heel for our analysis. She has observed me vaping in public with impunity and so picked up the habit herself, however, when she does so, she often raises an article of clothing like a cloak to conceal her face from others. I find this adorable, but it also strikes me as such a mistake that it sometimes makes my body tense with anticipated punishment. This is the sort of gesture you would animate for a cartoon vampire character who was trying to hide some unspeakable act. She might as well be holding a giant neon sign above her head that reads “I am doing something illegal”.
There are also much more subtle ways to mess this up. When I take a hit in my seat, I do not bother to look around first; I take a hit as if it were a routine behavior that is in no way out of the ordinary. I do however make sure to ingratiate myself to nearby passengers (and flight attendants) by smiling at them, being generally polite, doing the man nod3 where applicable, and probably engaging them in brief polite conversation. This helps for the obvious reasons. I am establishing myself as a fellow person who can be reasoned and communicated with, leaving them an entry to, for instance, politely ask me to stop vaping instead of ratting me out to staff. This all applies to vaping in any public setting. No one has ever done this before, I think basically just because doing so would be awkward.
The effectiveness of awkwardness as a deterrent is often underestimated. Very few people want to be the one to cause a big hubbub. If no one else seems to mind, then probably that’s because nothing worth minding is happening. It would be much harder to pull this off if you were on a flight with just one other person who could plausibly see you, but when conformity and diffusion of responsibility kick in, you are usually in the clear.
Notice that I say “very few people” and not “nobody”. There are those in the world who fancy themselves the line between civilization and anarchy. These folks—these instantiations of the ancient busybody archetype: the schoolmarm, the severe teacher in a long checkerboard dress with a high ponytail, the aging, gossipy priest most suspect of repressed homosexuality—of course revel in being the one to cause a big hubbub. You should learn to recognize them and treat them with extra caution. If they are wearing a mask in public and appear to not be sick, if they are dressed in the uniform of a dominant ideology (be it christian or woke), if they have a resting face that reads as if judgement comes quickly and naturally to them, I suggest watching out. This does not necessarily mean that you should now take extra care to conceal your transgressions, but you should at least now take extra care to make sure that you communicate to them that you are a person who can be communicated with and that you show no sign of thinking that you are perhaps doing something wrong. By the time you have attracted their scrutitny, you are likely screwed if you have not already made some gesture of alliance with them. Conformity and diffusion of responsibility are your allies here as well, but beware that they are not nearly as effective.
There are a few generalizations here that I would like to make for you across cases where you are interested in skirting a norm. These are general guidelines that work well in a variety of contexts.
1) Master the rules before you break them
Never break a norm you do not fully understand the structure of, the consequences, the methods of enforcement, the general web of norms and culture it is embedded within, etc. You should always act both as if you are quite aware what the rules are and as if you are quite sure that what you are doing is fine. This is much harder to do if you in fact do not know how things are done around here. This is where much of the sauce is.
People like to punish transgressors who know the rules and are breaking them, but they also like to inform people who are not aware of the rules, which often amounts to much the same thing. Feigning ignorance might grant you some mercy on an initial misdemeanor, but if you want to really break some rules, it’s best to already be intimately familiar with local codex of regulations and their surrounding informal bureaucracy. If you are someone who doesn’t know the rules or doesn’t know how they are enforced, that makes you risky to associate with. If you are someone who knows the rules and can break them without getting in trouble, this makes you a valuable ally.
The case of social faux pas is a particularly illustrative example. Nobody is really quite sure what counts as a social faux pas, and in the end what counts depends on what gets punished. A few folks have independently mentioned to me that I have a sort of area effect that makes people loosen up about taboo topics. The way that I manage this is largely by actually having an attitude that I generally know what counts as a social faux pas better than others and that most people are too conservative about this. You want to be in the position where people are looking to you to figure out what the norms are; not the other way around.
Start by committing an initial minor faux pas yourself to test the waters, but only after establishing yourself as a polite and conscious human being who is quite comfortable with the social graces. After that invite others to do the same themselves. Ask them a question where any reasonable answer is a bit taboo (many choices to choose from). They must see that you are capable of taboo without losing status in this context first, but once they have, you are already most of the way there. If you invite them to share in this power you have demonstrated, it is often hard for them to resist.
I heard once about a man who said that you should deeply understand exactly why a fence was erected before you decide whether to tear it down, I think this was the sort of thing he had in mind.4
I practice this rule a few different ways in the case of vaping on a plane. Firstly by not letting any visible vapor escape on my breath, but also by demonstrating that I am skilled at existing peacefully in public spaces. I am relaxed, pleasant, appropriately conversational, and audibly pleasant to staff. It might seem like the only rule here is the rule about not vaping. Not much to master, but that rule is actually interwoven with an intricate codex of norms governing how strangers should get along in public spaces, and there are definitely people who have mastered that code to different degrees.
2) Learn to identify and empathize with the ancient busybody archetype
As you grow up in the world there are various strategies available for dealing with the fact that many people who are much more powerful than you already have all sorts of plans for what sort of thing you should become.5 One of these strategies is to integrate with the adults and their power structures—to see yourself as their agent and coconspirator. If you are aligned with the bureaucracies that want to mold you and your peers, then their oppression doesn’t feel like an intolerable invasion, it feels like care and investment.
This isn’t totally unreasonable. Your parents, your school, that whole edifice, was in fact in some sense designed with your best interest in mind. Your parents definitely do care for you at least in some way, and your teachers probably do as well in their best moments. And they have built up some structures for executing their plans designed for your benefit: classes, roll call, extracurricular activities, sports, possibly church, etc. When others disrupt these structures, most of the time things do get noticeably worse. Time is wasted on the disruptive which could be spent on the obedient instead, and sometimes those who shirk the rules end up hurt. It really does seem that for most people at least, their best option would be to follow along and not make too many waves, allowing the structures built up around them to mold them into people who can get along easily in civilization. It’s a pity when they fail to see this.
And more generally, this is the sort of person who recognizes that the structures of our civilization are fragile, and many of them are there to protect our best interests, and so they see themselves as the few wise ones who have recognized this fact and aim to act in accordance with it. They really are correct about much here, but they are missing the extent to which hewing with these sorts of structures requires some to give up parts of their soul, and also the extent to which these structures are perfectly ok with and aware of that ask.
You may imagine then that in order to identify these folks you should look for people who are conformists, but a naive reading of “conformist” doesn’t really cut it. Norm enforcers exist who adhere to every ideology across the space of human ideologies. There are norm enforcers who are rationalists, christians, SJWs, etc. They enforce different norms, but they all share a righteous, dutiful joy in punishing perceived defectors—and dear reader, there is some of that joy in my heart (and I suspect yours) as well. It is that righteous joy that you have to watch out for. Do not become the object of it. In order to do that, you must not threaten their sacred principles, at least not within earshot, or if you are going to do so, do so with slow escalation and with an extremely seductive invitation.
When someone sees me vape in public and gives me a sort of askance look, I smile warmly at them, nod, and do a semi-winking motion as if to signal, I know what I am doing and I know that you know what I am doing. I appreciate you being in on it with me.
I prioritize keeping an eye on and being polite to anyone who is wearing a mask in order to keep out pathogens, since I suspect they would find it particularly egregious for me to pollute their air.
3) Break the norms you do not believe in, not the ones you do
A key part of getting away with transgressions in public is believing that you are not doing anything wrong. This is much easier to do if you in fact do not believe that you are doing anything wrong, and is somewhat hopeless if you actually do believe that you are doing something wrong.
This might seem like an easy piece of advice to follow; why would anyone want to break a norm that they believe in? But it isn’t really. Being able to truthfully say “I don’t think that norm makes sense” is not enough. If you have some compartmentalization going on, so that the part of you that controls which things you say you believe in public and the part of you that controls when to feel guilty are not aligned, that is not enough. You have to alieve6 that you are not doing anything wrong. Belief of the sort that warrants assertion will not cut it.
This is in part because norm enforcers are not looking out for whether you would endorse the transgression you are involved in, they are looking out for other sorts of cues that are much less under your conscious control: suspicious wandering eyes, paranoid posture, self soothing gestures that accompany the physical sensation of anxiety. You cannot avoid these with mere belief anymore than you can avoid your knees wobbling when you walk over a glass bridge by firmly believing that the bridge will hold.
If you are not the sort of person who already alieves that many norms are either pointless or unimportant, I’m not sure how to help you there. My usual advice would be to have some exposure therapy. Perhaps go to one of the successful norm violators in your life who may already know and ask them to mentor you for a short while. Most would quite appreciate the ask. Just as the busybody feels a righteous, meaningful joy in enforcing norms, so to do does the norm violator feel a sort of delicious, decadent joy in teaching the innocent freedom in action and conscience.
There are of course other reasons more prosocial reasons not to violate norms that you are not fully sure you endorse violating, but that is not what this post is about.
That then is my advice for vaping on planes and similar. Master the rules before you break them; learn to identify and empathize with the ancient busybody archetype; break the norms you do not believe in, not the ones you do. May you be naughty wisely, may you not be caught unless you deserve it, and may you negotiate well if you are.
Also, just like learn how to ghost hit vapes. That does most of the work probably.
If you are caught, I recommend being very polite, saying “oh I’m sorry I wasn’t actually vaping I was just putting it to my mouth out of habit” and eating it if you get fined.
To be honest, it is fairly likely that I am non-endorsedly defecting on a norm when I do this, but I also sort of think that civilization has handled the transition to vaping from traditional tobacco products pretty poorly, so I do not feel that bad about it. That’s not what this post is about, but I would like to say that I know I am being somewhat naughty here and it is a level of naughtiness that I am basically comfortable with given the circumstances. A better me would probably do better, but not that much better.
If you have never heard of this gesture before, see here. It is a surprisingly universal greeting in my experience.
This is not at all the sort of thing he had in mind.
Jeffrey Epstein was probably an absolute master at this.
I’m enjoying this fresh, unique, well-written new Substack. Way to hit the ground running.