Well I started vaping 12/12/11 and pretty much have been ordering kits, juice and several misc stuff. I think I'm scared of the fda stuff so I feel i need to stock up. Im sure there are ppl that have spent way more but I've just been ordering like crazy. I only order what I feel are deals and from vendors I've done research on.
Anyway I just want to know if any of you fellow vapers have consistently been ordering or if I have an addiction/obsession to ordering all this dope stuff?!
You're definitely not alone. You're one of the crowd, believe me. Everyone I know who vapes -- and that includes at least a dozen I've converted -- has gone through this. It's even an in-joke among us at this point that new vapers go through distinct phases, and we tease each other about it. Like someone else mentioned, some people settle down into a satisfying kit after a while and they're done with the experimental phase. Others (like me) keep playing with it. The $200+ mod I ordered last September was going to be my end-all ultimate vape -- until I saw a nifty box mod I wanted to try...
Here's the thing: it's still cheaper than smoking. Sometimes when I place my $30-70 orders with two or three places every 2 months, I worry about how much I'm spending. My hobby-habit is easily $100/month. Then I step back, and think about how some of my friends who still smoke complain that they're spending that much on cigarettes
per week these days, and I'm all smiles and clouds of vapor again.
And that's not even considering the "soft" costs I've avoided -- the bronchitis and prolonged sinus infections I don't get any more, the way when I get a cold, the cough goes away in a few days instead of a few weeks, and all the other health benefits to quitting that I have just enough smoker left in me to feel a little dirty reciting.
Besides, I think novelty and redundancy are really important for anyone who's trying to replace tobacco with vaping. I never even intended to quit -- I bought a kit for someone else, decided to try it out and break in the atties, and for a week or so kept thinking things like "Well, I kind of want a smoke, but I haven't tried the coffee flavor yet... yeah, coffee-flavored nicotine wins!" So every time the novelty of a new juice flavor wins out over an analog, and every time an atty dies but you just happen to have a spare on hand and don't need go to the corner store for a pack, those costs kind of justify themselves.
So don't stress out comparing what you spend to how much less you could be spending on vaping -- just remind yourself how much you're NOT spending on tobacco, and let the fun of vaping do its thing for you. You're still in what my friends and I call "the expansion phase", which means you're really starting to see vaping as a fun and satisfying habit in its own right, rather than just a thing you do instead of smoking. That's great. Let that happen. Encourage that to happen. That's the stage where you learn what you really like, and your perception shifts so that smoking becomes the inferior substitute for vaping, instead of the other way round.
I'm sitting here looking at maybe $1500 worth of vaping gear -- mods, batteries, 5ml sample bottles, weird atties and cartos, tank systems, passthroughs, and all, that I've collected over the last 2-years-come-April. It looks like a lot, a whole whopping frivolous indulgent lot, until I mentally rephrase that as "four months of cigarette money". I have a lot to show for four months of cigarette money, and none of it has to be thrown out to clean the ashtrays.
