Live Your Life in Clumps—Now Watch What Nicotine Does to the Timeline

David Eagleman has that eerie “afterlife” thought experiment where you don’t replay your life chronologically—you replay it grouped by activity: all your shower time in one block, all your commuting in another, months of brushing your teeth stitched together into a single, surreal stretch. In his words, you “spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex, one year reading email,” and so on. It’s a brutal way to see where your hours actually go.

Now apply that lens to nicotine.

In the cigarette century, your “clumps” are concrete, cold, and lonely. A pack-a-day habit (≈5 minutes per cigarette × 20) is ~100 minutes a day. Over 40 years that compresses into roughly 2.8 years spent smoking—not counting the side quests: stepping outside, hunting lighters, washing the smell out of clothes, waiting in the rain by the service door. In Eagleman-time, those become contiguous slabs: nine months standing under awnings, four months cupping a match, a full season apologizing with mints. The habit doesn’t just skim minutes; it carves visible epochs out of your life.

Reduced-risk formats (pouches, regulated vapes, heated tobacco) re-edit the timeline. The big lonely clumps—relocation, weather, ash, smell—get chopped to zero. The “nicotine” block still exists, but it runs in parallel with real life: emails, calls, workouts, commutes. In the Eagleman cut, cigarettes look like years sequestered in loading screens; pouches look like background rendering—the same minutes now co-owned by work, play, and presence. The behavior hasn’t vanished; the time topology has. We moved from wired hotspots (go outside to a designated zone) to wireless coverage (anytime, anywhere), and the edit suite of your life suddenly has fewer hard cuts and more crossfades.

This is the underappreciated engine of the RRP transition: it doesn’t only change toxicology; it rearranges your autobiography. When a product stops demanding its own chapters—when it can live between the lines—usage patterns expand, stigma contracts, and whole demographics (especially those penalized for spectacle and smell) lean in. That’s why the “re-nicotinization” story is bigger than substitution. You aren’t just swapping a tool; you’re rewriting the order of your days—turning what used to be two and three-year blocks of standing outside into minutes you actually get to keep.