This is entirely a subjective take but I'm gonna tack it on because it's the line of thinking that helped me finally quit after a pack a day for over 10 years (started at 19):
the cigarette company is your fucking enemy.
the cigarette company is a soulless corporation that wants you to be hopelessly addicted to a product that does nothing but kill you, but slowly enough that they can wring a meal's worth of money out of you every day that you could have spent on something more vital to your existence and happiness, but you won't, because if you have $10 in your pocket that's cigarette money before it can be anything else.
No one gets anything out of this exchange but some dickweeds getting richer and making you sicker.
I tell this story to everyone who will listen, but I smoked Pall Mall menthols and for a while there I noticed a piece of paper stuck to the back of the pack under the plastic that I kept not reading.
I assumed it would just be like, "cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer" etc etc and that had never deterred me yet so I didn't care. whenever people told me "those'll kill you" I'd do a big sarcastic "oh my god why didn't anyone ever tell me before?!" and take another drag.
One day I read the paper out of boredom. Paraphrased, it basically said "we were caught adding more nicotine to our products for the purpose of getting you more addicted and a judge ordered us to notify you so here you go."
They stuck the glue on the text side and slapped it on the pack so some of the words would rip off if you ever actually read it.
Up to this point the company had been an incidental non-entity in the margins of an exchange between me and the gas station clerk. Suddenly they were a very real player in my life with a vested interest in destroying my health and wallet at the same time until I die.
I felt like the company had just looked me directly in the eye while giving me the finger. They said FUCK YOU, ADDICT, GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY AND THEN PERISH with their entire chest.
And I was paying them over $7 a day to kill me
That's what made me mad enough to quit. And it still took me 2 years to actually achieve it.
I tried EVERYTHING. Nothing could make the cravings go away. Weaning yourself off is a joke, you never get to 0. I had to just stop cold turkey and suffer through it for a few months. And for a lot of that I wanted a cigarette every second of every day, until I didn't anymore.
And the way I managed that was by realizing that buying cigarettes is something I had to actively go out of my way to do, and if I didn't have any cigarettes I couldn't smoke them. Ergo, all I had to do was NOT buy any cigarettes.
It hurt like a motherfucker but it was still immensely easier for me to stay off them when I framed it that way: Making it through another day required me to simply do nothing instead of something. I'll take any excuse to do nothing, most of the time.
If nothing else, either quit smoking or choose not to start because fuck that fucking corporation