Have you ever felt hopeless? Feeling like everything in life is conspiring to work against you? I’m sure we all have these feelings occasionally, but for me, that’s all I felt back in 2016. During that time of misery (a lot of it due to my own self-inflicted despair admittingly) I came across a reddit page that, I must admit now, changed the trajectory of everything for me.
The page in question is called ‘’NoFap’’ this isn’t necessarily a promotion for the sub-reddit itself, its more so a reflection on a point in time when things changed for the better. As with all things in life, nothing ever stays the same. The NoFap page has changed since way back in 2016. For me, navigating the page was such a good place to go for motivation, support and guidance from like minded people who were feeling the same way I was. Navigating through it these days feels akin to how I feel when I end up on a sigma Andrew Tate YouTube shorts algorithmic rabbit hole.
I would imagine the support is still there, but I’d say trying to find helpful support from somebody there such as I received back in 2016 would be like trying to find a Trump supporter at a Marxism theory lecture. Finding that sub-reddit back then was like having a door open for me that led me down a path of self-acceptance, maturity and humility. It wasn’t like you had to follow a certain number of steps or achieve certain goals to be a part of that community you were just accepted as soon as you admitted you were struggling and needed help.
I’ve never gone to alcoholics anonymous, but I feel like being a part of that community was like being at an AA meeting. It was a known fact that you would ‘fall off the horse’’ but they were always there to pick you back up after and give you tips on how to avoid the banana skins for next time. They still had the 90-day plan that you can follow yourself today. But I find that people use it to achieve supposed ‘’superpowers’’ that is not only unrealistic, but a little bit cringe. The whole ‘superpowers’ thing was more of a tongue in cheek reference to how you’re actually just getting your brain back to it’s pre addictive patterns. The saddest part is the supposed superpowers are just how we should normally feel on a day-to-day basis.
Porn is the new drug that is mangling the minds of many young men throughout the world and creating depressed, fatigued, un-motivated blokes that have a distorted view on women and relationships and that can’t for the life of them ever understand why they feel the way they do, all the while going upstairs to ‘de-stress’ and flood their brains with more dopamine in the space of a second that a cave-man could ever hope to experience in three lifetimes.
Look, I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty science or try to explain addiction. For one, I’m not qualified and second, there are much better writers and scientists far more eloquent and intelligent than me who have spent their lives studying the matter. ‘’Your brain on porn’’ by Gary Wilson is a great start to understanding what online porn is doing to men’s brains.
As men we must be honest with ourselves and ask the question of whether we can continue to accept feeling miserable and discontent when there are ways out right in front of our eyes. Don’t get me mixed up though, a lot of people have serious medical imbalances in their brains which require medical attention and if you are one of those then please don’t think I’m brushing off your serious condition. I am simply talking about lads like me, who are suffering from self-inflicted misery.
If you are feeling like I was in 2016 and come across the article just know that I am a completely different
human to the one I was back then, you are not on a straight-line trajectory and had I of given up then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to discover how life is actually pretty decent. I know how unlikely it is that what I am saying will even change how you’re thinking right now but if I can even nudge you in the direction of finding change then for me that’s a massive success.
As much as I have seemingly dismissed the whole sub-reddit of NoFap, I would recommend checking it out and seeing how there are so many men out there feeling the exact same way you do. Hopefully one day you will graduate from that sub-reddit and move on from porn in the same way I did and think back to how it was once an immature bad habit that you grew out of.
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