You never chose the second one

You made one decision about this, and you made it a long time ago. Somebody offered, or you bought your first cigarettes yourself, and you said yes with a whole free mind. That was a choice. It had alternatives, it had a moment of consideration in it, it could have gone the other way entirely. Then count what followed. Tens of thousands, probably, and if you're honest, almost none of them involved anything you'd recognize as deciding. They simply happened, on time, in the expected order.

That's because they weren't choices, they were collections. A debt gets taken out once and paid a great many times, and the payments never feel like generosity, they feel like an appointment you can't miss. Nobody deliberates over a direct debit. Which is exactly why the second one, and the four hundredth, and the one first thing in the morning came with no deliberation attached at all. You weren't choosing them. You were being invoiced, and you always paid on time.

Now hold that up against the thing you were afraid of losing. Everybody braces for quitting to cost them their freedom, as though the old life was full of choices and this one is going to be full of rules. Look at what was actually happening. The free will you were protecting hadn't been exercised in years. Not once, not on any of those tens of thousands of occasions. It wasn't being spent. It was being held by somebody else, and you were told the arrangement was your own preference.

Which makes today genuinely interesting. Not doing it is a decision, a real one, with alternatives in it and a moment of consideration. You're using something right now that has sat idle for most of your adult life. It's supposed to feel strange. Unused things do. Free will is a gift, and gifts are meant to be spent, not stored. You'll make this same decision again in a few hours, and that isn't a burden to dread. That's the muscle coming back.