Thoughts of a forum member:
I have a feeling that I may be shortly spreading my wings a little and leaving this amazing nest that Marnia and Gary have built (thank you so much!) for slightly longer flights. I will try to come back frequently, but I’m not sure how much more I’ll have to say about PMO, as I feel like it is now gone from my life. There will probably be occasional echoes bouncing around – a moment of craving here, a low few hours there. But in the main, I feel like I’m back to my old self, in fact better than my old self – my old self plus spirit plus a penis. I’m meeting women frequently, and when I do, I’m strongly attracted to them, I’m sometimes getting erections even just in the initial stages of flirting proximity, and I’m loving checking out their breasts, which is something I have not felt in years and years. So I think PMO and its nasty effects are going and nearly gone. History.
However, I’m also finding that there are new challenges, that one might call ‘life after PMO’. To summarize (and the central point I wanted to make in this post):
We live in a society that boasts that it seeks out and fills consumer needs and wants. In some ways, that is great. If I need clothes or shelter, it’s awesome that I can just go out and buy these things rather than having to make them myself. On the other hand, I believe that many options available to consumers can be harmful to their best interests. Consider a man who finds himself lonely one evening at 8pm. In today’s society, what might he do? Watch TV, put on a CD, eat some comfort food like pizza or ice-cream, maybe a chocolate bar, play a fun video game, maybe have a beer, smoke a cigarette, maybe a little weed. The sad thing is that while all of these options, proud outputs of our consumer society, may make him feel better, none of them fixes the underlying problem. There is only one truly healthy cure for loneliness and that is meeting other people and hanging out with them.
We have evolved emotions over millions of years to be our guides in times of trouble. If we need food, hunger points us towards eating. If there is danger, fear makes us cautious. Every emotional reaction we have contains in it the seeds of the solution to the problem that emotion is highlighting. The problem with modern society is that we have ingeniously found so many ‘solutions’ that make us feel good, but don’t address the underlying problem. We have pain-killers, so that we can continue to use an arm that should be rested, thereby doing it even more damage (and buying even more painkillers). We have foods that taste far sweeter than fruit, so that we’re even more motivated to eat them for their wonderful nutritional value – except that candy has none. And of course porn, that makes us feel like we’re successfully mating with beautiful sexy women, when in fact we’re home alone with our pants round our ankles.
The way it should look is that you take an action and your emotions give you feedback – good feelings if the action was beneficial to you, bad feelings if the action was detrimental. If it was detrimental, the bad feelings point you in the right direction to fix it. So like happy rats we run along ruts made by our emotions that lead us to beneficial places, that lead us out of trouble, and into glory. Except all these other consumer options cause us to squirt sideways out of the rut – we get sidetracked into a no-man’s-land. Our emotional compass gets out of whack, and no longer steers us in beneficial directions. We get lost in PMO desensitization land, or alcoholic land, or dope fiend land, or obese land.
F*ck all these consumer ‘goodies’. PMO is only one of many, and all of them can be comfortable strait-jackets for your true personality and the life you could be leading. F*ck TV, junk food, video games, alcohol, cigarettes, weed. Real life is out there. People. Beautiful, hot, wonderful women. Cool, fun friends. Healthy, beneficial activities. Kick all that other shit to the curb. It’s only holding you back.
Life after PMO is about getting back on track. It’s about recognizing how PMO has been diverting you from correct responses into wrong responses – checking out women so you can wank to them later, firing up the computer when you get lonely or you’ve had an upsetting day, or a date didn’t work out. Taking those wrong responses means that life still sucks, because your response didn’t fix it. Life after PMO means recognizing and taking the correct responses. I’m not finding it easy, but it’s the right path, and that feels good. And it’s getting easier.
See his report of his first sexual encounter after rebooting below.
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