Yesterday I looked up Reboot Nation for the first time, after yet another marathon session the night before. Yesterday I deleted my stash of porn, 179 gigabytes worth, because it's way past time I did. I only mention the size because I'm astonished at how large it has grown, incrementally, over the years. It's taken some 10 years to build up, with a couple of relationships slowing things down for some of that time. I downloaded rather than streamed because then I can keep them forever, right? My own harem, as I've read somewhere else on these forums. Well it may be my harem, but I'm the slave. I want back my time and, more importantly, my imagination. It shrinks. Used to be, it was wide open landscapes and big skies. With porn, it's a jungle distance: I can see about as far as I can stretch out my arm. Every spare moment is about relieving my cock, and the walls close in. And they're covered in painted ladies: always new, always the same. I'm monkey-minded, and as my hand returns constantly to my penis so my imagination returns to my lizard brain and I find all I can think about is the easy pleasure. My mind is being stifled: all jack and no work makes me a dull boy.
Now, I feel neither relieved nor bereaved at the flushing of my stash. I feel like I'm waiting to feel something. I don't know if this is because it's still the holidays and I need to see what I'll be like in the normal run of things, or whether I can really just separate off some 20 years of porn use and look back at it like an alien world, as I would at exotic creatures behind aquarium glass. That's kind of what it feels like at the minute. It feels easy. I can't imagine it will be. But I'm determined to dig out my mind from this apathy and obsession. The monkey mind is the engine within us and our human intellect and imagination, that have made so much and thought so freely, they're driving this ignorant machine, making it something more than its biology. When the intellect sleeps, when the imagination is asleep at the wheel, that engine still runs on, heedlessly, satisfying its own ends, not worried at all about crashing. That's where I'm at. I've tried to turn myself into a machine. Now I'm going to try to turn back into a man.
Now, I feel neither relieved nor bereaved at the flushing of my stash. I feel like I'm waiting to feel something. I don't know if this is because it's still the holidays and I need to see what I'll be like in the normal run of things, or whether I can really just separate off some 20 years of porn use and look back at it like an alien world, as I would at exotic creatures behind aquarium glass. That's kind of what it feels like at the minute. It feels easy. I can't imagine it will be. But I'm determined to dig out my mind from this apathy and obsession. The monkey mind is the engine within us and our human intellect and imagination, that have made so much and thought so freely, they're driving this ignorant machine, making it something more than its biology. When the intellect sleeps, when the imagination is asleep at the wheel, that engine still runs on, heedlessly, satisfying its own ends, not worried at all about crashing. That's where I'm at. I've tried to turn myself into a machine. Now I'm going to try to turn back into a man.