# Your Best Friend Is Jealous of Your Lung Health (And Other Betrayals)

Here’s a thing that happens: you decide to quit smoking—a genuinely difficult, adult decision—and someone close to you starts offering you cigarettes with the consistency of a vending machine. The Reddit post that landed 5,900 upvotes this week documents exactly this phenomenon, and the comments section reveals a taxonomy of responses that ranges from “that’s a shitty friend” (accurate) to “I put the cigarette butt in my nose and handed it back” (a cry for help disguised as a punchline). The original poster’s buddy John, we’re told, was “clearly jealous” about the quitting thing. Not envious. Jealous. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between wanting what someone has and actively hating that they have it. This is the energy of someone watching you improve and deciding the only rational response is sabotage.

The malicious compliance angle here is chef’s kiss specific: the OP apparently accepted every cigarette offered, smoked it in front of John, then asked for another one immediately after. This is the conversational equivalent of speedrunning someone’s own logic back at them until they glitch. One commenter had the competing strategy—the butt-in-the-nose reversal—which is less “malicious compliance” and more “psychological warfare disguised as friendship.” Another guy reported the same thing happened when he quit drinking after developing a seizure condition, and his friends couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just power through an allergic reaction to avoid seeming uncool. The subtext here is brutally simple: some people don’t want you to get better. They want the version of you that matches their own choices, because your improvement reads as judgment.

The real comedy—if you can call it that—is how textbook this behavior is. Offer the addict the drug. When they refuse, offer again. When they accept (gotcha!), act confused about why they’re upset. It’s like watching someone run a tutorial boss fight on the easiest difficulty and still lose. The congratulations in the top comment (“Awesome job!!! And congrats on quitting”) reads almost apologetic by comparison, the way you’d pat someone on the back after they survived something that shouldn’t have been a survival situation in the first place. You quit smoking. Your best friend became a recurring obstacle. That’s not friendship; that’s a difficulty modifier.

The verdict, if there is one: John was never actually jealous. He was just mad you were leaving without him.