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In this episode, we discuss porn.
Participants: Yassine, Interversity, Neophos, Xantos.
Links:
E016: The Banality of Catgirls (The Bailey)
Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Behavioral Sciences)
How Pornography Can Ruin Your Sex Life (Mark Manson)
Does too much pornography numb us to sexual pleasure? (Aeon Magazine)
The great porn experiment (TEDx)
Hikikomori (Wikipedia)
The Effects Of Too Much Porn: "He's Just Not That Into Anyone" (The Last Psychiatrist)
Hard Core (The Atlantic)
Recorded 2022-12-18 | Uploaded 2023-01-12
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Notes -
Apologies if this is rude, but do you exercise/get outside much? Videogames, drugs, porn, etc. all perhaps make life more tolerable, sure. My issue with them is that they are tempting substitutes for healthier coping strategies such as exercise. I have a brother who got very into videogames and slumped deeply into depression for reasons related to anxiety. The thing that got him out of that hole was ridiculous amounts of exercise. Even today he tells me that that's pretty much the only time he feels good, but since he does it all the time life is pretty good.
And sure, you could just say that that's one guy who just really likes exercise, but even if it's literally just [guy finds a hobby he likes] then even that is prevented by the behavior you describe.
I won't tell you drugs ruined him, but I think it's plausible they prevented him from getting better. Who knows what sorts of experiences someone can have in their many decades of life that might turn them around.
If my point isn't clear, I think the general rule here is that all behaviors have substitution effects. For you, porn and pizza substituted for suicide and that's great, but I argue that they may also have substituted for some more healthy behavior which would have substituted for suicide. I'm sure that both events (substituting for suicide and substituting for exercise) happen so it's kind of a bravery debate how much we should encourage these less healthy pastimes.
These days, I work out about five hours a week early in the morning, and try to go to at least one social event on weekends. I am very well these days. In the period I'm talking about, though, entering a gym or party would be like a normal person entering them in the middle of a five alarm fire.
Exercise, sleep hygiene, etc is a good solution to moderate problems. Not everyone's problems are moderate. (For the record, I saw a therapist during that period but didn't benefit from it, in part because he sucked and in part because I bullshitted threatening questions.)
In my case, I have a high predisposition to social anxiety, and the structure of life set me up so that I had invested many tens of thousands of dollars, including a good deal from my parents, and at the eleventh hour I went from a 95 percentile student to someone who was on the verge of flunking because he could not do what society required of him. Getting out of that mindset, years later, required defeating self-loathing despite a lot of external evidence that I was lowlife. Were I to meet my mid twenties self today, I could give him good advice, but I guarantee jogging wouldn't have done the trick. (I tried self-improvement projects, sometimes successfully, but they never touched my feeling of worthlessness.)
This is a good point. I certainly won't discount vicious cycles; at minimum, my second cousin nuking his brain precludes him reaching a normal life. Lucky for me, Azumanga Daioh didn't have the same effect. I would just suggest that he entered the vicious cycle because of the hyper-bleak nature of his life, rather than superstimulus leading his life to become bleak, which is the way people usually talk about addictions.
I wonder how much of the difference between the two comes down to consistency of the stimulus. I just saw an episode of azumanga dioh and found it healing, but if I had a constant happy voice in my ear, perhaps I would find it too much, as people who constantly drink soda or take drugs find themselves dissapointed with life once their hedonic treadmill 'speeds up' in response.
Personally, I'm in my early 20s and would love to hear your advice. I had a crisis and dropped out of college senior year, but instead of using supernormal stimuli, tried to punish my 'bad' self by rejecting media and pleasure, and ended up just wallowing in pain under the covers with occasional food, internet browsing, or masturbation binges. I think what really brought me out of it was reading a terry pratchet novel and laughing for the first time in a while. When I was younger always having a comedy or fantasy novel was immensely helpful in dealing with the pressures of school. Personally, I'm taking classes again vaguely connected to what I actually care about, though eithout a clear path, and trying to make friends irl, but I still have days I hide from everything. Any little bit you can give helps!
Hm, let me give it a shot. Sounds like you're doing better than me at that point. It's worth linking Scott's survey of anxiety interventions from back in the SSC days, which ranks common advice by effect sizes. That said, if my story sounds familiar, I may have some tailored advice.
Getting better is about putting yourself in the best position to experience the gift of grace. What is grace? Sometimes a baby bird warbles in its nest for a long time, but mother never returns. Eventually the baby bird stops making noises. It does not believe mother will return. The bird may grow to believe warbling is pointless and it really ought to be learning to fly. If you do not warble, though, you're unlikely to experience grace.
If you're like me, your problem is a socialization defect from early childhood that leads you to create walls between yourself and others. Everything else wrong with your life is a second order effect. Sometimes your problem manifests "positively", such as when you work fiendishly hard to show a respectable face to the world. However, when respectability seems impossible, you retreat and attempt to become invisible. It may feel strained to say "You failed to complete your coursework because your couldn't form close and genuine relationships", but that's what it is.
First, something important to understand, at least intellectually. A person's ability to be loved does not spring from arete. Although arete is a good thing to cultivate — indeed, it may come from a healthy self-love — excellence is orthogonal to human worth. You may agree with that, or if you're a cynic, deny it; but either way it's not the way you feel in your bones. Developing the notion that your "core" is pure and can be touched, and feeling it deep down, is the gift of grace. In it, you are able to glimpse yourself in the third person, and feel naked compassion.
Upthread @Ioper suggested turtling and delayed adolescence come from young adults with unrealistic expectations for themselves. They deserve to be famous artists, or have a super hot girlfriend, be rich, etc. I would say he's a little off. A young adult who turtles has convinced themselves they must be remakarble to compensate for what is defective; they must be so remarkable that no one could accuse them of being useless, rotten. This leads to alternating cycles of feverish preening and quiet despair.
Getting better is about assembling evidence that you're wrong. You need to compile this evidence that you are lovable in a currency your limbic system understands. A few approaches:
Practice pitying yourself. This is usually frowned upon because it reinforces learned helplessness, but for this issue it may be useful. Identify the ways in which you were set up to fail, and where you had a hard time. It's fine if the only thing you can think of is that you're weaker than others. Practice might take the form of journaling or structured meditation. Alternatively you could read fictional or non-fictional stories about people like yourself and experience vicarious pity.
Find the people who you know (logically) are nicest and/or closest to you. Speak to them in an unvarnished way about yourself. Go from smaller less threatening truths to bigger one, in a structured progression.
If the above is impossible, try imagining it. Invest the time in filling in and visualizing the interaction.
Try expressing your admiration for people you respect or feel a debt towards. Cards and birthdays are an excellent chance to do this without it seeming awkward. Carefully observe their and your own reactions.
By hook or crook, get a circle around you at least that knows you exist. Worming into an existing group is ideal, but it's also fine if it's just 'The people who come to Panera every day around 6pm.' You will not connect with them properly, but it's important that such people are around if the miracle of grace occurs.
Practice identifying times you are comparing yourself to others. When you notice these comparing thoughts, think about what you observed in 1-4.
You may realize this closely resembles cognitive behavioral therapy. Yep.
While you do these things, you may want to engage in /r/getdisciplined or /r/fitness style self-improvement. I won't dissuade you from that, per se. I actually recommend nutritional tracking a lot actually. However, it's important to remember you are not doing these because you "must", that you will be a loser if you don't improve yourself. You are doing them because you wish to be happy.
Best of luck!
That is not quite what I meant. I meant that people who have the capacity to become a nurse refuses to do so because they think being the medical field and not being a doctor is beneath them.
What they think they deserve is high status and refusing to settle for average/slightly above average status leaves them with nothing.
This also happens to (mostly) boys in school. They feel like they will be humiliated if they exert effort and only get an ok grade or fail, so they disengage.
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My brother was in a similar situation and, well, jogging didn't help, but more exciting stuff like skiing did. The trick wasn't to defeat self-loathing but rather to get busy, exhilarated, and adrenaline-fueled enough for it to no longer matter so much.
I'm pretty sure 95% of the benefit of most therapists is that they listen to you. I also tried a therapist at one point and she also sucked. I think they are mostly just founts of compassion rather than problem-solvers, and that's not what I needed. Was your experience similar?
Yep, I've been there too, and videogames were there for me when it happened. I don't want to totally bash on them. For years of my life, I haven't been unhappy, but I've consoled myself by basically saying "well, if everything I'm striving for fails, I would still be pretty happy to just hang out in an apartment and play videogames all day." It's nice to have that rock-bottom, guaranteed safety net.
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Honestly reminds me a bit of the debates around vaping, regarding how much it is substituting for smoking cigarettes vs getting people hooked on nicotine who otherwise wouldn't be.
I'd say the most obvious things that pot/porn/video games have replaced (in terms of being the go-to unhealthy coping mechanisms for young despondent males) are booze/whores/gambling. Of course, booze/whores/gambling are still on the table, so in addition to weighing pot/porn/video games substituting for those vs getting people who would otherwise be clear, you have to consider that now someone can go for all six.
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