“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” –Frank Herbert
Discussion threads on porn use
We often hear about how our culture is becoming “pornified” thanks to today’s eager Internet users and their suppliers. Yet those giving up porn are also beginning to shape our culture. Like soldiers returning from the front, they offer some of the pithiest and most moving insights into the realities of life with, and without, highspeed porn.
As hosts of www.yourbrainonporn.com we see a lot of websites where men (primarily) speak freely to each other about their experiences with—and beyond—porn. For example, there are 35,000+ explorers on Reddit.com alone, the overwhelming majority of whom are young enough to have cut their teeth on today’s uniquely stimulating highspeed porn.
Post-porn culture is still under the radar for the moment—because most of those affected choose to remain anonymous—but here’s a preview of what is in store as these young men move into positions of influence in future professions:
The rest of the article is quotations from different guys:
“It only becomes apparent how badly porn affects you when you begin to recover and discover that you’re a much more capable and confident human being than you ever imagined.”
“It’s crazy how we went from being a totally repressed puritanical society, to a completely depraved wanton society whose motto is, “If it feels good, do it.” Where is the balance??? I think in 10-20 years it’ll become mainstream knowledge that excessive wanking, especially to porn is detrimental to one’s well being. Sure, porn has been around for a long time… but never until the last 10-15 years have we been exposed to so much porn. You don’t have to go to the seedy “book store” to get your fix. You don’t even have to pay for it, and can be up to your eyeballs in it immediately. That is not natural.”
“(17-yr. old to 13-year old) As for the people who will tell you that you should be masturbating to discover your sexuality, don’t let them influence your choice. If you have fapped once, you now know how it works, and fapping more times won’t teach you anything more.”
“It was hard, but [rebooting] helped me completely change my life, to the point where I don’t even recognize the insecure, scared little pr**k I used to be.”
“The world needs to understand that if you take a perfectly healthy guy, and let him watch high-speed internet porn every day for 10 years, there’s a good chance you will no longer have a perfectly healthy guy. Simple as that.”
This has been a problem for too many of us for too long. Get angry. Get really angry. This addiction is robbing us of our time, the most scarce and precious of resources, and energy, what we use to make efficient use of that time. This is our life, and it’s being wasted on stupid shit like fapping. To someone who isn’t there. There are no benefits to PMO. Absolutely none.
Would you be angry if someone robbed your bank account? This is in a different league of bullshit. It isn’t your money being robbed, it’s your time, and it’s your energy. You can get money back, what you can’t get back is time. Energy can come back, but it’s very hard to replenish. All you’re doing when you fap is fucking yourself over. Doesn’t that make you angry? It makes me very angry.
Next time you have your dick in your hand, get angry. Angry that you’re jacking it off like some sort of demented baboon, while there’s someone in the world taking advantage of your lack of action in the real world. Angry that this even exists. Angry that you have to start from the ground-up. Angry that you’ll never get another chance to make-up for those missed opportunities that you could have had. Angry that you’ll never get those precious moments of time that could have been spent doing the plethora of other things that a human can do on planet earth that are infinitely more valuable than jerking your meat.
“My 86-year old granddad is rough, but honest and smart. Once, he saw me watching porn and said to me, “This is not making love to a woman. This is stupid. If you look at this, you will make your hand a p___y and your willy a fool.” I did.”
“My mindset has definitely shifted. I was never thinking that porn would cause problems for me but it did and quitting porn use confirmed this.”
“Porn has polluted the well of the human imagination.”
“People seem to often suggest that porn’s sort of blind lust is the natural biology, but I think they fail to realize that there is nothing natural about having had your decision making software affected by pornography and corporate media for decades. On a philosophical level it comes down to really accepting our rational consciousness and our sense of morality as ‘natural’ too, not as something separate from our base desires and the world around us.”
“To those who have a problem with porn’s ill effects: Believe in what you can see without any third-party interference. We must disregard the phony maps we have been given of the territory, and instead make our own maps.”
“I wonder how many people view porn on a daily basis and think nothing of it, constantly angry about how they’re socially awkward etc. I swear I spot these people sometimes; the downcast eyes, not knowing what to do with their hands or where to stand. An epidemic of people with mental barriers.”
“Porn takes away from you exactly what you need to get past it: confidence.”
“Porn is nothing more than shadows in the cave, and I’m tired of it. To anyone who is thinking about using: It’s just not worth it.”
“Boys will be boys” doesn’t exactly apply anymore. Parents need to understand it’s more like “Boys will be antisocial, self-loathing, freaks who will never produce a grandchild for me.”
“I’m never going back to my old habit, because now I know a terrible truth: You can fastidiously hide your wank stash in a labyrinth of folders within folders disguised as inconspicuous files; you can fap in secrecy; but when you go out and interact with your fellow humans your habits are visible. TL;DR: If you unplug from the matrix, you can see the code.”
“Every great life has had in it a great renunciation.” – Zan Perrion
Imagine if we’d all been born during the Roman Empire, with porn limited to frescoes and pottery. We’d all have rock hard wood and could lay it no problem.
So I just hit my one-year anniversary. I last masturbated on October 22, 2012. I promised myself that I would only orgasm in the presence of my wife, and I’ve kept that promise. I wanted to give the other married guys out there some advice. Many aspects of my life have improved in the past year, but right now I’m going to talk about sex. I’m 48, and we’ve been married 20 years.My advice: Stop watching other people have epic sex and jerking off to it. That’s sad, and it’s not what you, a man, were designed to do. Go to your bedroom, to your under-served wife, and have some epic sex of your own.
“[To a young guy] This is your relative small window in time where a multitude of nubile females are not that terribly interested in stable, nurturing relationships. They are out to explore. And you are sitting at home, strangling your snake until it cannot even puke anymore?”
I wanna go back in time and smack myself for thinking my sexuality was immune to porn.
I’ve never had trouble with substances, and I’ve tried everything I could get my hands on (‘cept heroin…though I’m curious). These digital drugs can be way worse than all of that. Not only are they available everywhere, they’re FREE. The last two weeks have been the worst, where I’m literally sitting in the same spot on the couch for up to 14 hours a day, every day, playing games, watching tv and occasionally jerkin it. I have to force myself to go exercise or meet friends to keep my sanity. I haven’t picked up a book and read more than a page in weeks. Why you fuckers are awesome
“The more success you have socially and personally, the more you realize how you never want to go back to the way things were. When you get that compliment, or that smile from the girl you pass on the sidewalk, it’s magical. You grow too big to fit back into that computer chair.”
“There’s no economic interest in doing a study on quitting porn. There is no product to sell and no service to be provided. The general public is not even aware of the issue at hand (pun intended) and unable to perceive it in more than undiscerning moralistic terms. This means that it is unlikely that there will be a study on the subject in the near future, and those demanding “scientific proof” before quitting are placing an easy one-way bet.”
Seriously – if you could put “no porn” in a pill, you’d make billions of dollars.
“Every. Girl. I’ve been with has had a load shot on her by me. Why? Because it looks like you’re supposed to do it. Why do they let me? Because it looks like I’m supposed to do it. I’ve given girls anal strictly because of the theatrics, even though it wasn’t pleasurable to EITHER of us. For many of us, porn made it so that sex is more about theatrics than the experience, when it should definitely be the other way around.”
“I no longer think of myself as a machine that needs to be ‘serviced’ so I can be productive in the rest of my life, but as a living breathing organism, full of hormones that can be used as a vehicle for caring passionately about those around me.”
“We need to start a campaign to educate people about this. Seriously. My depression and anxiety that I have had for over 7 years have COMPLETELY gone away in the last week. I feel like a totally different person. I’m confident, outgoing, my memory and concentration have come back, I can talk to girls and I don’t give a shit. I WANT TO SHOUT THIS FROM THE F**KING ROOFTOPS!
Schools need to have sex education classes on the dangers of watching porn and on the science of addiction. And we need them now, before anyone else has to go through the hell that I’ve just escaped from.”
“When I was watching porn, I was a very ineffective member of society. I did not give 2 hoots about the following: Work, Family, Debt, Women’s feelings, The prospect of child-rearing (it just seemed ridiculous to me – why would anyone have kids?). The dangers of addictive drugs, Voting & politics, My local community, Patriotism. I mean, I would be able to write long Reddit posts on why something was right or wrong, and philosophize endlessly. But when it came to action, I was a dead agent. If any reasonable proportion of guys are anything like I was, then we, as a civilization, are in pretty big trouble. There is a historical myth that the Roman Empire fell due to the subtle effects of lead poisoning – a side effect of their impressive new lead plumbing technology. Whether this is true or not is not relevant to the point. What is relevant is the analogy to today’s computer monitors, which have plumbed their way into every home and every bedroom, pumping the Internet into brains.”
“In future we will look at pornography like we do cigarettes — soo good short term (1 minute). Soo bad long term (80 years, or whatever your life expectancy is). So, be early adopter. Do something right now that everyone will do in maybe 80 years.”
“It is so great not to be up past 11:00, while my family is sleeping, pursuing that relentless hunt.”
“(A week into recovery) I’m looking at the world though a semitransparent layer of porn. And let me tell you, talking to somebody whose face is covered with vaginas is really disturbing.”
“Porn offers the ‘quarter pounder with cheese’ effect. It’s easily available. It’s made to look good and we automatically yearn for it, but once we have it we do not feel truly ‘full up’ and kinda regret it…until next time we have that hunger pang.”
“If I didn’t have Internet access, I would have zero desire for porn.”
I’m in Bangkok right now, but only for a few days. You would think being in a sex-driven city like this, instead of fapping, little old virgin me would be looking for the real thing. I must have gotten 10 offers just walking down the street, not even in the red light district. And yes, I even walked through Soi Cowboy, but just out of pure curiosity and wanderlust and not for other reasons.
This is to affirm that my goal isn’t sex. If it were, I would surely have it. But I don’t like superficial relationships. I don’t like anything fake.
There’s a thing out here in SE Asia about showing different faces to different people based on roles. Bar girls show the face of a caring, affectionate woman, but I know that is just for show. Once the money’s gone, they don’t love you anymore, not that they actually did in the first place. This is what I see every now and then in these parts–western guys falling into traps and hating the culture even though they were the ones who brought trouble on themselves in the first place.
NoFap teaches me to see past the illusions. I’m not looking for icing on the cake. I’m not even looking for the cake because we know that is a lie. I surround myself with genuine people. The moment someone starts faking something or not being straight up honest, they’re cut.
NoFap turns you into a real person with a personality. Porn and sex business make you not a person but an animal who has been trained to only respond to the word “fuck.” We can do so much better.
“It’s all about the hormone (dys)regulation. After three weeks of no porn/masturbation you feel clear and well. After a relapse, the world comes crashing down. Really interesting to see how your mood goes from – HELL YEAH IM GONNA ROCK” to “Excuse me for breathing air; I’m such a loser.”
“My 13-year porn habit was like breathing, a daily ritual that I never missed, sick or injured, rain or shine. If I broke both my hands and was wrapped up in a full body cast I would find a way. If I can get through a proper reboot, I will name a street after myself and declare a national holiday in my honor.”
“Porn addiction: an inability to find, what you’re looking for in life because you’re in some ways numbed.”
“Masturbation in moderation is ok as long as Internet porn is out of the picture. Articles on masturbation always miss out that key point.”
Stumbled upon this quote when reading the book “40 ways to view Churchill” by Gretchin Rubin, a book I coincidently would never have gotten around to reading pre nofap: “The reason that I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in the bedroom” Winston Churchill quote on semen retention
“Oh, the good old days, when seeing up a girl’s skirt on the stairs would give you a month’s worth of jerk-off fuel.”
“Thanks porn… you were the perverted older brother I never had!”
“I’m in my mid twenties and a sufferer of this apparent new-fangled 21st-century, broadband-driven ED disorder. I’ve had three chances to lose my virginity with real flesh and blood women and I’ve failed every time (as in, these women were in my bed and ready to go, clothes off, but I couldn’t do it. I’ve had other chances, and even other girls sleeping in my bed, but I didn’t make the move because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it… even between the ages of 18 to 22). Each time felt incredibly embarrassing, depressing and emasculating. I’m a raging heterosexual, but I simply could not have sex with these women. If I could choose one word to describe what it felt like when I tried to have sex with them, I’d use the word ‘alien.’ It felt artificial and foreign to me. It’s like I’ve gotten so conditioned to sitting in front of a screen and jerking it with the death-grip all these years that my mind considers that to be normal sex instead of real, actual sex. I can get hard for porn, no problem, but not for the life of me can I get hard for a real woman.”
“There are more cases of ED than ever before, for not just older guys but guys OUR age (I’m 23). First time ever in the history of the earth. And people are worried about what’s better.. the i-Phone 5 or the Galaxy s3? What has happened to us? I know my dad and grand dad weren’t like this. They were motivated people driven to achieve what they wanted in life.”
“[Age 22] What do people do when they find something they enjoy? They just want to do it over and over again. That’s what an addiction is. I didn’t know better as a teen. But now I do! What about a disclaimer with the porn saying: Hey, guess what dude? This is going to seriously screw with your life. You’re going to jerk off way too much and you might develop some sexual issues.”
“Once I’m 100% recovered, I’m going to guard my sex drive like Fort Knox.”
“There are tidbits of info out there that paint masturbation in a super-positive light—a result of the oh-so-liberated culture that has been developing. Most of it is from the same sources that will encourage readers to raise kids without a gender, encourage them to have sex early and often and with whomever, satisfy whatever weird fantasies they have, etc. No matter what your stance is on the morality of this stuff, anyone should be able to understand self-control is necessary in ALL aspects of life. I hate this culture that effectively advocates a complete lack of sexual restraint.”
“It is very strange thinking about what my life was like a month ago. PMO was such a part of my life that it is surreal realizing that it is almost like you had a really horrible ex-girlfriend who is finally out if your life.”
“I’ve found during this recovery that the girls that I would have classified as solid fours in my porn days have become sixes and sevens. In fact, they’re all cute.”
“I was convinced that I need to always have as much sexual release as possible; that it’s “not cool” to not have it; and you’re a loser if you don’t get it. That’s the messages that popular culture sends unfortunately. Really what pisses me off is that I didn’t know about Internet porn being a problem AT ALL.”
“I thought I was a pessimist, but really I was just an addict.”
“I lay with my girlfriend and kissed her slowly and softly and for a long while. It was wonderful. How beautiful she is! This is real, this is what we need. Porn is so stupid, it is laughable! Porn sucks; what on earth were we thinking? Porn is about exploiting male sexuality, not endowing it. Ultimately that’s why I drifted away from it.”
“It’s nice that old enjoyments tend to return, once one gets off the gravy train.”
“I sincerely believe pornography in the modern world since the advances in photography and film/videography as far back as the late 1960’s has damaged the healthy attitude towards sex and relationship including boyfriend/girlfriend and marriage.
The ease of the Internet access since at least mid-90’s when it became popular has caused the widespread consumption. Pornography is a potential social-psychological crisis, but there is nothing we can do to stop this by law (i.e. hypocritical moral panic that abrogate the freedom of choice to promote moral order in the society).
Only the voluntary withdrawal with self-control with the intent of prodigiously increased virility might lead to the fulfilling sex life that makes the marriage complete, which is optimal bliss (the state of happiness) with total compatibility in personality and sexual relations.”
The fked up porn industry has conquered kids minds. I can imagine 10 years from now they’ll give children a color book of porn stars in hot positions.
“Times were different in the 90s. We were still sneaking around with VHS tapes, squinting at scrambled skinimax, and commuting to school on brachiosauruses. I think 10 years from now a whole generation may wake up to how they’ve hyper-sensitized their brains.”
“Just smiling makes you open to people wanting to talk to you. It’s amazing how humans rely so much on being social. It’s like the best medicine and free to anyone. Internet porn/masturbation made me isolate myself from social life.”
“[Thousands of men quitting] is a good sign. I see it as a revolution in human sexuality, or rather a return to normalcy. I think society scoffs at the idea of internet porn as being a real problem, which makes it all the more dangerous.”
“I’m wondering, how many PMO addicts were there, before sexual revolution? Before the first magazines? How much heart disease before food modifications? How much depression before removal of frequent touch, 100% natural air and sun? How many lung cancers before cigarettes? THE thing is to realize, that world is changing too fast. In last 100 years we changed probably much more, than in last 1000+ years. And here is the schema:
1) Exciting, but bad in long-term, behavior is introduced for money
2) People get hooked
3) Precise, scientifically backed-up research takes decades to kick-in
4) Hooked people start to get educated
5) They start behavior-elimination.
Problem is that this whole cycle to damaging. Cigarettes were (widely) introduced early 20th century and took decades to regulate. We now know that certain types of foods are harmful. Yet, with food we are still in phase 2-3. Guess where we are with pornography? The useful scientific research is not even a few years old.”
“Quitting PMO is wayyyy harder for me than alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, whatever! I know that’s not encouraging, but it’s good to know for the annals, right? Just to let the doubters know: This is a real problem!”
“Only a few generations ago we would all be like Vikings ‘n’ s**t, smashing other dudes’ heads in with an ax. Now most guys can’t even go into a frigging bar and say ‘hi’ to a girl. Something is very wrong.”
“My best friend’s dad was the neighborhood guy who distributed porn before it was readily available. I was nine years old when I was shown my first porn vid. Plus my friend and I had access to the stash. It was the equivalent to having access to Internet porn back in the day with no parent to stop you. 30 years later, I don’t think it is a good thing to have the access that we have to porn then or now. It is probably way worse now because if you have children it is very difficult to shelter them from it. You can do what you can in your own home, but that’s not going to stop anything.”
“This is what I feel after just 28 days: My wife is multi-dimensional. So are all the lovely women I see, talk to and interact with each day. Porn had not turned me into some slobbering Neanderthal, but it definitely had maladjusted me for a full experience with people.”
“I think that every male of our generation needs some perspective of what porn does to your brain. To gain that perspective has been eyeopening. I feel more clear in my head and more love towards my SO. I see no reason to stop at 90 days. I can’t say that I’ve felt the “superpowers” described in other fapstronauts stories only increased mindfulness, more love to my SO and happiness in general. That alone is enough for me to motivate a life with no or little porn.”
“You Know You’re Watching Too Much Porn When...You get so bored of heterosexual porn you start viewing transsexual and then gay porn, just cause it is something new”
“The largest example of hyper-reality by far is pornography. It’s sexuality, one of life’s most intimate and sensory encompassing actions, being infinitely reduced to a virtual experience devoid of any sense beyond sight and sound. You are not having sex with a partner or porn star, and you are not having sex with yourself; you are running a socially-conditioned simulation of an ideal of sex, a knowingly unobtainable object of desire that you virtually become attached to until you are satisfied, after which you are sucked back into the “unsatisfactory” reality of being naked in a room, alone.”
“My parents didn’t really punish me when I got caught, so the incentive was to get better at hiding it. That becomes part of the thrill—feeling one step ahead of everyone else”
“Imagine all the new energy and potential we’re creating [as we recover]. If it keeps growing like it has and I don’t doubt that it will, we will slowly but surely create a huge wave of self-disciplined and strong men.”
“The best things in life are not microwavable; recovery takes time.”
“My wiener size is pretty average/not big and I’ve always been shy in the gym showers etc. When I was much younger it bothered me to the point of not wanting to go to school on gym days. Now I do sports with friends and shower afterwards, and totally accept it. My thought pattern has gone from “They are gonna laugh at my small d**k” to “Penis size is not a hindrance to a good life” to “F-it, Not watching creepy sex empty of love with huge dicked freaks, I believe, is beneficial to acceptance of our bodies.”
“There may be cases of otherwise normal, healthy people who are held back/damaged by porn, for whom porn use represents an ‘addiction,’ which is the cause of their various problems. For many if not most of us, however, I think it is part of a larger picture of our generation. We have, many of us, been allowed to extend our adolescence far, far into our twenties (or even thirties!) through the general permissiveness of modern culture and parenting, and the availability of various distractions provided by our technology. We become docile and passive because we never have to fight for the right to enjoy life. Like being suspended in a tank and fed from a tube, our muscles (both actual, mental and emotional) are denied the vital stimulation they need to develop. Quitting porn is one very important step for people such as us, but it is only one step. We have to rethink what it means to live, and ask ourselves if we are truly doing so. Such introspection is painful, but necessary.”
“I work with elementary kids, and it feels REALLY good not to have pornographic images playing through my mind while I teach them about gravity or whatever… last school year, [my daily porn habit] it made things REALLY WEIRD at school when I’d remember clips during moments of boredom or anxiety in the classroom. GROSSSSSS – this school year has been much better. Related: my classroom is much better managed this year… a correlation!”
Personally, I view porn as an allergy—like people who can’t eat nuts or wheat. They don’t deeply fear nuts and wheat, but it’s in their best interests to avoid them. I view porn in a similar sense. It’s not an ultimate evil. It’s just something I’m incompatible with. That is all.
I am finally becoming the person I have always wanted to be, a person I can be proud of. Sure, I still have bad days, but the good ones outnumber them by far.
I’ve been using porn for 20 years, and it hasn’t just been about getting turned on then jacking off. It’s been my solace when I’ve been disappointed, or bored or sad about something. It’s been reliable, private me-time that’s always been there for me, never failed me. Every time I’ve gone to it, I’ve found something that I could jack off to – it never let me down. Sometimes it was fun, the challenge of tearing through endless links, outwitting sites and trying to find their stashes of pictures. I felt like I was running wild through the porn wild west, finding the gold, the kill. And whenever I was lonely, it was there. So I realize that it actually has been a relationship, and easily the longest I’ve had. If my brain can’t tell the difference between pixel pictures of women and real women, it probably can’t tell the difference between getting all the other feelings – reassurance, comfort, thrill – that porn has given me over the years and getting those feelings from a real woman. D’oh! There’s like this weight in my heart that’s hard to shift. I know it sounds pathetic. But I really think my brain on some level thinks I’ve broken up with porn, and it’s sad about it. I’m going to kick my brain in the testicles so it knows to be strong and not be pathetic about it, but it’s also good to recognize where those feelings are coming from.
I live in Brooklyn and random people ACTUALLY SAY HELLO TO ME ON THE STREET since quitting porn. How is this possible? NoFap superpowers rip people out of their matrix trance.
“Think about it – porn, which used to be a good thing – a marital aid – is now an industry bigger than the NFL. It’s piped into our homes. And to stay competitive and profitable, it pushes boundaries all the time. But take a trip in a time machine – let’s go 1992. Poll 1000 adults. Ask them ‘What is a facial?’ A vast majority of them will refer to the beauty practice. Fast forward to today. My buddy from India was in America for about a month when we passed a salon that said “Facials.” He gave me a look, and said “I can’t believe you can do that here!” I clued him into what it meant really quickly and laughed. He watched porn a lot in India. The meaning of a word has radically shifted”
“The thing about porn is that you don’t even need to be horny, you just need to be bored. The porn will make you horny.”
“(Age 24) With the easy access to junk food and porn we are constantly feeding our emotional system with ‘feel good’ crap. We teach our bodies to live on fast food, and we push away the discomforts of sexual frustration with a simple click of a mouse and some lotion. At which point will you begin to take back control of your life and become the dynamic force in the environment? To become the action not the reaction? It all starts with willpower resisting reactive behavior. No longer settling for anything less than you deserve. Demanding a beautiful, live woman instead of a pixelated, airbrushed, fraud. To thrive instead of living a life of mediocrity. I haven’t watched in 157 days. Now, I hardly ever even think about it. When I was at 85 days, I wrote a summary of all the superficial benefits I had received from quitting masturbation to porn. I return today to inform you that the benefit runs much deeper than what you see in your life. It runs deep down into you masculine core. Quitting porn is one of the main keys to taking back the controls. When you are no longer manipulated by sex, a new world opens up to you. You have a freedom in life that you hadn’t before experienced.”
“After you climax and the porn is still playing, that’s when you see it for what it really is.”
“All this exposure to porn and instant-gratifying masturbation had conditioned my body correlate sexual desire w/ visual & mental stimulation. When in fact, GOOD SEX, is about feeling and has nothing to do with these mental/ visual images. When you starve yourself of this level of fantasy, your body freaks out. It goes through stages of weird/unpredictable behaviors. Once it reunites with its natural way of being, all is how it should be…in life, in the world, in the bedroom. Quitting is not a magic pill. It will not solve all your problems. However, paired with a few healthy-habits, it provides an excellent foundation to a life of your own design. Nothing is more fulfilling than the feeling you get when you’re actually thriving and not just surviving.”
“We are encouraged (unwittingly) to throw our brains out of balance. And then, there’s no satisfying them. Eventually, only the thrills offer pleasure and everything else seems bland and boring. Someday, this will become common knowledge, and we can stop all the silly discussions about morality v. sexual freedom. There is no true sexual freedom when the brain is out of balance.”
“We live in a time where staying inside doped up on SSRIs, alone, having tons of imaginary fairy sex with your primal appendage is acceptable. People just label these people “shy” or “introverted”, but I think we have an epidemic. This shouldn’t become normal. And giving up masturbation to porn has become taboo! Everyone is starting to accept that masturbating your problems away is just “evolution” or something. I know some people that think I’m stupid for quitting, but these are also the same people that sit at home playing hours upon hours of League of Legends, whining about how they need a girlfriend, and answering with a fist full of anti-depressants. I would hate to see this become the norm, but I feel like that’s where this is all headed if we don’t do something about it. As much as I want to procrastinate, stay at home, and do my lonely activities, I will fight this. We’re the ones who have a chance at seeing the view from the top of a mountain rather than from a camera from a plane on a synthetic screen. Or servicing our fake internet girlfriend. We’ll taste, touch, smell, see, hear, and feel life”
“To 99% of human beings that ever lived, the conditions of my life would be considered unfathomable luxury and privilege (even though I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in the UK). I am incredibly lucky but it is a double-edged sword. If you subscribe to the principle of Hormetism then you will accept the idea that the human biological organism responds well to stress and deprivation, and less well to gratification and comfort. Strength training, intermittent fasting and cold showers all stress the body, inducing positive adaptation. Junk food, a sedentary lifestyle and 5 and half hours of CoD per day will weaken you and turn you into a spineless, flaccid jellyfish. For many of us, quitting is our very first experience of deprivation. It feels uncomfortable at first but more often than not induces positive adaptation.”
“Lol, it’s pretty silly that if someone were to ask me what the greatest accomplishment of my life has been, I’d probably have to respond honestly, “I stopped habitually watching porn and masturbating.” 🙂
“It’s really cool being able to have female friends now and not be thinking about sex with them constantly. I’ve realized I no longer objectify women like I used to when I was addicted. I’ve heard horror stories of Dad’s no longer being comfortable giving their teenage daughters hugs anymore because it makes them feel dirty. Not only that, the idea of checking out my daughters friends is way to creepy for me. I am so thankful that I won’t have to deal with that. Your whole view of porn changes once you have a daughter.”
“They should show the TEDx vid in high school sex ed/PSE classes. I know me and my adolescent mates were more likely to suffer from pornography addiction than catch an STD
“
“[Female rebooter] I was just reading a psychology today article that talked about how it is a new trend for parents to try to solve all of their childrens’ problems. This is bad, because children need to experience discomfort in order to learn how to deal with their problems effectively. I think this is true for adults as well. If we’re constantly used to instant gratification, we will become disconnected from dealing with our discomfort appropriately.
In school they taught me how to cut wood, stich a towel and make a clay pot… Funnily enough i do not need these skills in ANY way for my every day life. It would have been nice just to have one or two classes on neuroscience where i could learn to actually develop my own brain and mental capacity. Fuck. That would have been so powerful at 13.
Day 4: Porn is like the American Dream.
What was sold to us is a house in the country with lots of space and fresh air, free from all the dirtiness of the city. Free from crowds, panhandlers, grifters, filthy streets, smog, traffic, violence, inequality. A place where we could work on the old Mustang and let our dog and our kids run free in the yard. A retirement that would provide for us as in old age so long as we’d been faithfully saving.
Instead, we got spec houses and cheap McMansions in sprawling car-dependent neighborhoods near to nothing. We got porches too small to even sit on. We got underfunded school systems rife with ADHD, anxiety and depression. We got processed foods and fast foods and too much sugar and too little exercise. We got reconstituted patties shaped like the part of the animal we forgot we were eating. Our retirements were invested here as well, and we lost our shirts when the markets saw suburbia for what it is, an imitation of something real.
What we forgot was that everything worth having is the result of hard work.
In the same way, porn was sold to us like the American dream. What we bought was an easy way out. We wanted satisfaction and porn was easy. Easier than talking to a girl, a girl who is way out of your league (and frankly, aren’t they all?) who might blow you off on a whim or who might have a boyfriend who is bigger than you. A girl who might, for what ever reason, break your heart. A girl who if she is worth anything will make you wait a goddamned second or two because she knows it will be better for the waiting.
Instead, we got instantaneous satisfaction. We got sedation, and placation and something that felt like something real — a thing we once knew or something we’d only imagined. It was at once bigger and better than our wildest dreams could conceive, and at the same time less meaningful and less thrilling than just a word whispered into our ear, from the lips of a good woman. Still, we bought it and we got off. And after a while things started happening. Suddenly, it wasn’t as good or it wasn’t enough. And we used more. Before we knew it we were letting our wives or girlfriends writhe in the bed next to us because of PE or ED or because we were gaming or watching TV to distract us from what was happening. We let them forget what real intimacy felt like and, in turn, we began to forget ourselves. Our work suffered, our families suffered, our minds suffered. We began to throw around blame. At last, we were emasculated.
Again, we’d forgotten that everything worth having is the result of hard work.
The good news is that others still remember. And in the dark recesses inside us — the place where we often fear to look in for what we might find — so do we. We know that the feeling of collapsing in exhaustion at the end of a workout is more satisfying than any drug. We know what it feels like to really go after it at work and reap the rewards of a job well done. We know that investing in our educations is more valuable than any car we might drive. We know that charity and sustainability can make us richer than any material excess. We know that a good book is far better than television. We know that porn will never mean as much as looking others unflinchingly in the eye.
And even the most porn-addicted among us knows or at least hopes to whatever god may be that when he dies he will take with him the memory of satisfying a woman, of holding her as she cries out in utter ecstasy, unable to draw breath. Of just lying beside her. Running his fingers through her hair.
That, gentlemen, is what quitting is about for me.
TL,DR; Like the material trappings of the American Dream, Porn is a cheap, shitty imitation of something that is real and that is damn well worth having.
If all of mankind did not need surfing for Porn up untill 15 years ago – for sure, we don’t need it either.
“I’m aware that some couples use porn safely, that doesn’t mean that it is not extremely risky these days – with a never ending supply of free, instant, and increasingly hardcore porn. Sure some people can use porn without their life falling apart, some people can use cocaine without their life falling apart too, but I am still going to warn everyone of the dangers of using it. Past generations of couples might have historically used porn to “spice things up” but with the new beast that is Internet porn, couples are now using porn to “get things up”.
It’s kind of a ridiculous first-world problem if you think about it. As a result of having the highest speed internet in the history of the world, this is what we get.
Just think about all of the people that have gotten well because of Nofap. Realize any theme? It is that they almost always become more productive and better people when they are clean of the addiction. Isn’t that interesting? Imagine how productive our populace would be, imagine how strong our economy could be, if 95% of the male population was not addicted to pornography and thus were able to reach their potential.
This is probably even more relevant with regards to education. People always blame our horrendous education on “lack of spending” or “lack of school competition.” Do you know anybody who has not performed better in school after they started noFap? No. Everybody does better in school when they ditch the addiction. So just imagine what our schools would be if 95% of our students weren’t frying their brains on pornography?
Here’s what so many of us lack in every day life: the fight, the struggle, the exhilaration of overcoming life. Hungry? Grab some cheap processed crap in the drive-thru. Tired? Lie down in your air-conditioned house on your memory-foam mattress. Horny? Jump on the web and rub one out.
We were not made for this life.
“Seeing the world through porn addicted eyes Meanwhile, in real life, because my mind is so sexually overworked, I’m not responding like a human being to all the real sexual beauty I encounter on a constant basis. Real life beautiful girls aren’t sexual objects anymore. The normal sexual stuff like the missionary position with a beautiful girl (things that used to get me rock hard just thinking about it) aren’t things I think about anymore. It’s like this beautiful mind that god gave me to imagine healthy loving sexual relationships has been killed by porn. ... There’s not really anyone out there preaching a porn free lifestyle, and how your sexual mental health depends on it. That disappoints me. I now know that happiness and sexual fulfillment are never going to happen in front of a computer screen. I’m hoping my recent experiences and this community will help me find the strength to live the life I know I need to live.”
“I still occasionally succumb to the lure of online porn. What’s wrong with that? You may say. Everyone needs a little escape. Fantasy and masturbation is natural. You need the occasional release.
Well, I don’t necessarily disagree with those sentiments, but I also don’t believe that falling into a dope-addled daze for hours on end, while watching increasingly questionable material in order to get off, is the kind of occasional release that I want in my life.”
“In the end, everything happens for a reason and this disorder has saddened me, but also really helped my perspective on others and life! Sex is something to be gifted with…. And I definitely learned that the hard way.”
“This is just so tragic! It’s depressing to think about because guys can’t feel the benefits of stopping porn for a while after they quit. It feels like a problem that can’t be turned around. I’m twenty-something, and I feel rather helpless thinking about it, and very sad for most young guys out there who really have no messages from culture steering them away from this disaster in progress.”
My thoughts about how serious this is..
As you can see I’m at day 10 but it’s been a long time since i’m on the nofap way. All this time had made me think about how men react with porn.
And I found this : As many of us know, the human being highest objective is to get better so he can reproduce. But the arrival of internet porn changed everything, now, anyone can trick is brain so it believes he’s reproducing.
That’s the real danger of PMO if you can get the highest objective sitting in front of your computer and that even if you got a shitty life why improve yourself ? Why become important ? Why create, invent ?
That definitely got me off porn as long as my will-power will win ! Good luck fapstronaut, We can destroy porn from our lives !!
ps: english’s not my first language, don’t mind to correct me
I have come to think that pornography (and passionless sex) acts as a widespread anesthetic on human sexuality and energy, leading to numbness and boredom.
I don’t blame anyone in particular for this result, but it seems obvious to me that porn subdues the natural human instincts in a more fundamental way than even watching television, or consuming drugs. All of these numbing effects of society lead to pacified people, to consumption of additional products, to the apathy towards politicians (who can then point to the pointlessness of their job, as they steal from others).
I think numbness leads to the end of social behavior, or to its capture in symbolic rules that subvert personal responsibility and autonomy – we feel like we interact, but maybe we don’t.
Rejuvenating the natural human sexual instinct in the face of widespread porn may be one of the ways you can rebel, against conformity, against boredom, against the endless cynicism that debases our beautiful and amazing lives.
And finally, from two public commentators and YOUTube:”
“A mind originally designed to cope with little more sexually tempting than the occasional sight of a tribeswoman across the savannah is rendered helpless when bombarded by continual invitations to participate in erotic scenarios far exceeding any dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities, nothing to arrest our passionate desire to renounce all other priorities for the sake of a few more minutes (which might turn out to be four hours) in the darker recesses of the web. Porn is so immediate and intense, it destroys our capacity to engage in the far more human and low-key business of actual sex. [Porn is] nice for some, but in a way that destroys things that are more than simply nice; that are essential to life.” —Alain de Botton
“Today’s porn is truly a brave new world, with boundaries lasting only as long as it takes a dopamine receptor to downgrade.” —D.L. Hilton, MD
Will NoFap ever go mainstream? (Reddit discussion)
The Day the Earth Stopped Masturbating (movie trailer)
Comedian Chris Rock quits porn (radio show clip)
;
Theory: Dopamine is the actual addiction, not fapping motivates
From another forum
90-day report:
FROM YBR
Form fetish porn site owner
More from Alain de Botton
One guy’s summation:
From another forum
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/162and/the_uk_contributes_85_new_fapstronauts/
leaving this subreddit. Here’s the best text I’ve collected.
I relapsed and as a consequence am leaving this subreddit. Here’s the best text I’ve collected.
Porn lament
Recovering user:
Young guy’s thought
One guy supporting others
in an amazing thread:
Guy laments lack of monogamy
Another guy:
Mid 30s
From another forum
I don’t think society knows what internet porn really does to a man!! all they really associate porn with is ED. Porn Turns a man into a scared Boy!! Your socially awkward, Depressed , No motivation , Can’t focus , Very insecure , lose muscle tone , makes your voice weaker ,Have absolutely no control over your life. Men are going to the doctors Getting prescribed all kinda meds, when really it all comes down to porn and what it does to your brain and body 🙁 Ive been off porn one week and feel better than I felt in 20 years !!
More than 100 guys say why they are quitting porn
in once sentence each:
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/17578k/why_are_you_doing_this_wrap_it_up_in_one_sentence/
(Day 27) Age 19
Funny comment on another forum
Comment of guy in fetish thread
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1bivpl/fetishes_getting_way_out_of_control/
Funny post
Why you should relapse today
submitted 13 hoursago by dota2nub
What NoFap means to me now vs. when I started it.
15 year old boys won’t go to doctors talking about ED. That is t
Because PMO is pretty fun right? – forum member
To those of you just starting out, You will not be able to understand this right now. It will not make sense to you. It will seem like a lie or an exaggeration. But what I’m about to say is truth: Real women, with all their perfections, imperfections, emotional scars and beauty are far better than anything you will ever find behind that computer screen.
What you see on that screen is not real. What you imagine in your mind about women and how they feel, what their touch is like, none of that is real. NONE OF IT IS REAL!!!
Your brain is broken. You have built up a fortress of lies, and it has become your prison. You are trapped here. You look around and see what other people have and think to yourself, “this will never be me.” I will never have that hot babe. I will never get laid. I will always be alone. I am ugly. I am sick. I am a pervert. I have no choice. This self medication is my only way out.
All the while a girl sits across the room from you. A girl who – if you let her – would change the very foundations of your world. A girl who would respect you, a girl who would enjoy your company, a girl who could love you. But a girl who you will never meet because of her flat chest, or fat legs. A girl who will inevitably fall short of your twisted image of perfection. In your head, that girl is only body parts. A meat show. And the meat is not to your liking.
Yah, argue with me all you want about how much you respect women and how you see them as people. But, please tell me, when was the last time you talked to a girl without rating her? Which is easier to remember, her name? Or her cup size?
Porn is exciting. Masturbation is easy. Orgasm is pleasurable.
Venerability is terrifying. Action is hard. Rejection is painful.
Go ahead. Enjoy your porn. Spend the rest of your life jacking off into a tissue. Because PMO is pretty fun right?
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1evzig/because_pmo_is_pretty_fun_right/
From another forum
We several thousand have been working with every fiber of our being to improve ourselves, to step away from evil, and to move forward towards a new dawn.
It is a dawn without discouragement, a dawn without self-pity or self-deprecation.
It is a dawn without anxiety, a dawn of courage.
It is a dawn without weakness, a dawn of strength.
It is a dawn without distraction, a dawn of focus.
It is a dawn without stagnation, a dawn of progress.
It is a dawn with pain. And with pain comes progression.
It is a dawn of new feeling, a dawn without flat-lines.
It is a dawn of new wisdom, a dawn without thoughtlessness.
It is a dawn of new triumph, a dawn for all people.
It is a dawn without fear, without misery.
It is the dawn without fap.
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1ao87h/standing_ovation_for_you_fapstronauts_on_behalf/
In every meaningful way, porn kills your dick’s soul.
Health warnings on porn sites
From another forum – “All the good guys are asleep”
The Porn Delusion
Comment by fapstronaut
60 days – Better erections, easier interactions, ADD gone
Miley and the Glorification of Pornography in American Culture
Porn/masturbation discussion on forum
[Comments by founder of http://www.yourbrainrebalanced.com]
It is universally agreed that in order to beat pornography addiction we must, at the very least, significantly reduce the number of times we masturbate.
Then comes the question “What to do after reboot?” or “What to do when you have already beat porn addiction?“. This question is flawed because it assumes that you’re going to be cured after XX days. If only it were that easy. We’re talking about 10, 15 or even 20 years of sexual conditioning here.
But even if the question is legit, people will start wondering “Well… if I went XX days without masturbation… then I can certainly continue like this, why masturbate at all? Is it really necessary?“, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that line of thought.
You asked me how do I know that porn and masturbation are tightly linked together. Well, I’ve read enough posts from guys to know that it is true. I’ve been in this community long enough. Most porn addicts nowadays do not masturbate if it’s not with porn. Maybe you are the exception to the rule, but it doesn’t take away the fact that since tube sites and smartphones became popular, men have conditioned themselves to use these tools as an aid to masturbation.
There is no such thing as “I will be cured after XX days“. If your definition of being cured is getting rid of ED, then yes, but you will soon realize that this goes much more deeper than that. ED is just the tip of the iceberg.
The only guys who get fully cured are those who adopt a lifelong change in philosophy when it comes to sex and masturbation. Guys like GABE and WhirlwindTobias. The latter for example finds value in depriving himself from instant gratification.
A balanced state of mind is not just about dopamine receptors or sensitivity. It must be accompanied by a healthy view on sex.
Abstaining from porn won’t do shit if you’re still thinking in terms of “I want to get rid of my ED so I can go and fuck all the women I want” or “I want to get to day XX so I can then masturbate whenever I want“. But that is something I only learned until I finally got a girlfriend.
A porn addict who is abstaining from hardcore porn but is still checking out girls on Facebook, sex chatting on webcams, fantasizing about sex constantly, and masturbating on a regular basis, is doing it wrong. He’s doing absolutely nothing to deal with his addiction to novelty, lust, and fucking.
That’s why most people fail. They do nothing other than trying to abstain from watching porn. Their mentality regarding sex remains the same. It remains “pornofied”.
When people realize this then that’s when they decide to quit masturbation and instant gratification forever. They are trying to make a deep change in their lives.
That’s what me and many others are trying to do right now.
It’s not about being a monk. It’s not about being anti sex or anti masturbation. It’s about achieving happiness by not centering your whole life on “fucking hot chicks”. This issue must be handled, otherwise you will never have a satisfying and healthy relationship with a woman, because no single woman can ever satisfy a porn addict’s obsession with novelty and fucking multiple girls.
http://www.yourbrainrebalanced.com/index.php?topic=12477.msg216368#msg216368
Before Porn
Letter to porn industry by recovering guy
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2p0x8r/my_beautiful_letter_to_porn_and_porn_industry/
Blessed are the NoFappers, for they shall inherit the earth
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2qm3su/blessed_are_the_nofappers_for_they_shall_inherit/
This has been a transformative experience.
I don’t know why exactly I am feeling this burning desire- but I
Comment to a woman quitting porn