Holocene said:
How worried should I be that I smoke about 10 cigarettes a day?
Very. You stand a very good change of soon working your way up to a pack a day habit. Once this happens, you've got a long, hard road ahead of you when you decide that you want to quit.
Holocene said:
I'm 24, and only want to live to about 60 or so.
Trust me, the older you get the more you want to cling to life. You may think now that 60 is a ripe old age, but when you've got a few more years under your belt the prospect of dying as young as sixty will seem obscene. For some context on this, my father died at the age of 69, which is terribly, terribly young given his lifestyle, where he lived, and his socio-economic status at the time of his death.
Dying at 60 would be pretty terrible, to be honest.
Holocene said:
Will I seriously die ealier from smoking?
Will you
definitely die earlier? No. But that rather misses the point: life expectancy is inherently probabilistic; the life expectancy of a smoker in the developed world is far, far shorter than that of a non-smoker. I'm paraphrasing a bit but the latest research I've read suggests that if you quit by 40 and manage to survive the next ten years after that, you've got essentially the same life expectancy as someone who never smoked.
That said, don't be fooled into thinking you can survive until 40 as a smoker. The number of people who die as a result of smoking before they reach 40 is pretty shocking.