Porn Addiction, Web3, and the Possibility of Escape
February 3rd, 2022

I used to think porn addiction was about morality. A harmless pass time.

I’ve since learned that it has nothing to do with morality and religion.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve had the chance to speak with hundreds of porn addicts. And what I see scares me. I am seeing a rootless group of young men who are numb, purposeless, and in deep pits of self-hatred and hopelessness.

The only way out will require a different technology built on a different philosophy.

That’s what this piece is about.

I’ve felt all this myself. I was a porn addict for 17+ years.

I first stumbled across it at the age of 12. It was still in the days of dial up internet, so the images came slowly and videos were non-existent.

A few years later, when we got high speed internet, I became a full fledged addict. Everyday after school and before going to sleep, I started using porn.

I tried everything to get out. Willpower, distractions (cold showers, push up challenges, etc.), praying, self-hatred and guilt, and everything else in between. After a while, I became numb to it.

Over the next 17 years, through college and many relationships (and eventually even marriage), I found myself hooked to porn. In putting my partners and then my spouse in these pornographic fantasies.

It wasn’t until I got into my thirties that I finally was able to beat it. Without any feelings of agony. It was out of my system.

Through sharing my stories, hundreds of people starting emailing me, chatting with me, and eventually getting on calls with me.

I still continue to talk with men almost daily. They come from all walks of life. Some as old as 14, and others who are well into their 50s. They’re students, doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, and everything else in between. They’re Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, Buddhists and Atheists, Agnostics and everything else.

The Roots of Addiction

People come to me telling me they needed to quit. In some cases, their literal lives depended on it. For others, their jobs, their careers, their marriages, their families depended on it.

But they couldn’t quit it.

What kept so many people addicted to this substance?

Just one thing: that the pain of quitting felt greater than the pain of continuing on. In other words, they benefited more from continuing on than they did quitting it.

So how did it benefit them? How does it benefit you?

For some people it was about knowing how to deal with a bad day at work. Or a shaky marriage. For others, it was about the stress of an exam, or the rocky tides of unrequited love. For others still, it was a sense of boredom. Even when they had everything, they still felt “not enough”. It was an emotional crutch to get through their lives.

Life without this crutch was too much. The pain of quitting was higher than the pain of continuing on.

Finding an Escape Hatch

Even though the pain feels so overwhelming, the way out is to recognize that the pain is completely imaginary. It is a lie to think that it will hurt.

In reality, the pain is barely noticeable. It is the fear of an imagined pain that keeps people hooked.

How do you get past this imagination though? I’ve learned that the best way to do it is to conduct experiments in self-knowledge.

The self-knowledge to describe every aspect of their experience.

Really understanding what happens when they sit down in private. When they open up the browser, go incognito, and start the search. I have them reflect on the jumping from one place to another, one tab or video to another spot. Never satisfied. Building and building the tension, the anxiety, the agony. Until the orgasm finishes things off and brainwashes them into believing that all this pain, agony, anxiety, tension was pleasurable after all.

I have them reflect on the pain of never being full. Imagine sitting for a fear and never being able to stop eating. To have to continue eating forever, until you biologically are about to burst.

When people break down their experience of watching pornography, they find it was devoid of any pleasure anyways. It was a empty shell. They find out that their crutch was never needed, because their leg was never broken in the first place.

A Different Technology

I believe our technology has helped us access more “stuff” than ever before. I believe that web3 needs to be built on the foundation of working with our minds. Our minds are given a veritable buffet of stuff at each visit to the Internet (which for most of us begins when we wake up and ends when we sleep).

We aren’t built for that. Existing solutions are all about blockers and trackers.

I believe there’s a different model possible. A technology that asks us to slow down, introspect, and remind us that mindless consumption makes technology the crutch to get through our lives.

This isn’t about meditation apps, or productivity hacks.

That’s why web3 really excites me. Web 2.0 was about mindless access. Web3 is about asking each and every one of us: What do you want to participate in? What do you want to create? And then, it asks us to put our skin in the game in a deliberate way. Our time, our energy, our money, and our tokens are at stake.

Web3 is about real community. Great people will be able to come together and find new models of media consumption, production, and creation. This is altogether a better thing. We will move towards a more wholesome nutrition form of media that nourishes our minds, our hearts, and our souls.

Is this enough? Of course not. But it is a big step forward.

I believe true freedom will come when we all get much better at being able to sit with ourselves and look deeply into the void of our lives and stop trying to distract ourselves from it. When we have the courage to heal it.

Until then, let’s get on the web3 train!

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