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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 -
Thoughts about the last two episodes. (Great show by the way!)
There is a story that comes up a lot on the topic of superstimuli. It goes something like this. 40th percentile person Joaquim Expemplar uses media and drugs in his formative years. Because games, porn, and weed satisfy Joaquim's basic needs, he feels okay about his life and is unmotivated to pursue achievements and authentic relationships. Over time, by indulging himself in peace, Joaquim stagnates into becoming a 20th percentile person, then a 10th percentile person, and then one day he wakes up and finds he's a big failure who is compulsively using superstimuli to distract himself from the squalor of his life.
This story makes a lot of sense. But recently, I think the causal chain is getting reversed here. Mine isn't an original hypothesis, but it's worth restating.
People who are living even mediocre lives don't fall into the trap by playing more and more videogames, taking harder and harder drugs, and watching more and more porn. Every teenage boy is trying drugs and playing videogames and watching porn a lot. Nine out of ten times, this behavior decreases to a healthy(er) equilibrium after the boy grows up, gets in an LTR, joins the workforce, etc. Now, it could be that the other boy was genetically predisposed to get wrecked by superstimulus. But it seems to me the only people who ultimately became addicted are those whose lives were already decisively moving in the direction of FUBAR before they started dosing.
n=1 sample. I spent five years in a pit after college. The need to write an 100 page capstone threw me into an anxiety crisis that spiraled out of control. I just barely finished the required task a year after graduation. I was too afraid to interview, so I ended up staying at a dreary dead end job as an on-call substitute teacher. I actually inbox-ignored a good job offer from a professor because I found myself too humiliated for him to learn what happened to me. I couldn't bring myself to go out and socialize, visit family, etc. After work I would religiously play Europa Univeralis III (for the sense of an interesting job), then watch a slice of life anime (for a sense of friendship and going outside to do fun things), and of course masturbate to porn afterwards.
You can say that, if I hadn't had access to these things, I would have been more motivated to get out of the pit. That doesn't seem right to me. I have reflected on this and I'm convinced that, all those years ago, had there been a fitocratc revolution in the late 00s and a public health inquisition shut down all the porn sites, arrested the hosts of Nyaa Torrents, and installed firmware in my computer to block eu3.exe from loading, I doubt I would have formed healthy habits to fill the vacuum.
I was like a mouse caught in the airbubble of an upside-down cup. The mouse treads water without knowing which way to swim to reach the big blue sky again. Sometimes, the mouse may try treading water even harder, elevating its body momentarily out of the water. But this can't work, so the mouse eventually tires and collapses, back to bobbing its nose to breathe.
Realistically, I was in the pit because I was terrified, not because I was unmotivated. Without these replacements I likely would have exited stage left.
That is my personal experience. But I also think I pretty sensitive to changes in people I've known in life longitudinally, and I can't think of any cases of people who were doing okay in life, and then went off the deep end into a superstimulus rabbit hole. For example, a second cousin I know who's been in and out of rehab for years was a marginalized weirdo, friendless, and withdrawn when he was eight. You can't tell me drugs ruined him. He was already ruined.
Superstimulus, in this story, is just bread and circuses for the broken-hearted. Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality. This puts people in a position where porn and pizza really are their best option.
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.
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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