Porn pandemic
Men account for more than two-thirds of all visitors to pornographic websites. The gender gap is also visible in the frequency of pornographic consumption, meaning that men visit pornographic sites more frequently than women. Children are especially vulnerable to this disease, especially with the high availability of porn that is usually only 2 clicks away on the internet. According to data on pornography use, a child's first exposure to pornography occurs at the age of 11 years old. New study (from the security technology company Bitdefender) claims that children under the age of ten now account for 22% of internet porn consumption among those under the age of 18.
Porn mega sites like P***h*b are among most frequently viewed by children under the age of ten, which is particularly concerning. The sickest part is that one out of every ten viewers to adult video sites is currently under the age of ten. According to a recent research from the NPCC ChildLine, a tenth of 12 to 13-year-olds believe they are hooked to pornography. 10% of 7th graders have reported that they view enough porn to be afraid that they may have an addiction problem and may be unable to stop. Most of those infected by this disease are men, which is why this article will be mainly directed at the male population.
First, let’s demystify what you are doing as a man who watches porn. You sit there, alone in the dark corner of your room while searching for a considerable amount of time for that perfect clip with that woman you wish you could have and that man you wish you could be. Than you start watching some alpha guy demolishing a woman "from your dreams" while you are beating your monkey in front of the screen because that is all the miserable creature like you can do, just sit and watch. You are basically cucking yourself while doing this. The only difference is that you watch a woman that you wish you could have instead of the woman you already have, so it is even more miserable than being a classic cuck. Can you imagine how humiliating and pathetic that is? Your subconscious knows this. That is why you want to be sure that no-one will open the door of your room and see you during those pathetic moments, why you hide, why you clear your browsing history, and why you feel shame and disappointment in yourself when you are done.
If you respect yourself or have any sense of honour, this alone should be enough for you to stop watching porn immediately, but if this isn't enough, think about the negative ways porn affects your life and be honest about it. I say "be honest about it" because people who are unable to quit an addiction begin to rationalize why continuing to consume that addiction is a good thing. You are not fooling anyone when you justify your addiction with "11 unexpected benefits of watching porn" that you read on some mainstream media outlets like dailydot.com. Your only motive is that dopamine "hit" that gets you "high" for a few minutes, like a dog that gets reworded with a cookie after performing. Since watching porn releases huge amounts of dopamine, your brain will down-regulate your hormone receptors over time to maintain state of homeostasis. This will affect your motivation because you will eventually become numb to the normal levels of dopamine release that you get after being productive. So, why waste time studying for the exam when you can watch porn and masturbate for a greater dopamine rush than passing the test would provide? By doing this, you are draining your virility, energy, and motivation on short-lived dopamine hits like a junkie instead of using that energy to build yourself into a better man. Dopamine also surges for novelty, and because of the Coolidge effect, it will diminish over time when you watch the same x-rated movie, and shoot right back up when you watch a different one. This means that, over time, it will take new and even weirder experiences to get you aroused. The same goes for drug addicts who crave stronger drugs to keep getting the same high that they got in the beginning. You will spend more and more time searching for that perfect clip, pushing the boundaries of what arouses you in more extreme directions. Eventually, normal heterosexual sex will not be enough for you, so you will start searching for degenerate stuff while developing weird fetishes like foot fetishes, furries, cuckolding, masochism, and so on. Another problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between watching porn and having sex, so in the span of a shameful afternoon with a few extra tabs open, you can have more sexual partners than your ancestors would have had in their entire lives, according to your brain. This means that you will get used to unrealistic and deviated standards for women that you see as candidates to be your future partner, so you will lose attraction and become blind to the natural beauty of average women who don't look like silicone sex dolls. You basically end up creating an intimate bond with an artificial, fake world, causing you to lose the ability to bond with real people. The way you see women will become unhealthy, your standards will be unrealistic, and in the end, your "Ding Dong" will stop working because of erection problems caused by porn consumption and desensitization.
Because the whole concept of porn is sex without emotional closeness, the underlying hunger always remains unsatisfied. By consuming this content, you could subconsciously brainwash yourself into thinking that sex is the primary bonding agent in relationships, but it isn't. What makes a relationship meaningful, what makes a person feel valued, cared for, treasured, loved, respected... is emotional intimacy, not physical intimacy. Even satisfaction with sexual union between two people who are emotionally close is far greater than in prostitute/client type relationships, so there is really no need to search for other sorts of sexual pleasure or enjoyment (like porn) outside of that relationship. If you are with a girl just to masturbate with someone else’s body and recreate videos of filmed rape, then do whatever you want. But if you care about your girl and you want to have a loving relationship based on mutual respect, then you should keep in mind that any woman that loves you will feel betrayed and disappointed every time you consume porn. Bringing other (even artificial/virtual) strangers into the exclusive realm that should be reserved between the two of you ultimately creates emotional distance and breaks trust, the founding block of every healthy relationship.
Like a drug, porn is used to experience pleasure and escape feelings of stress, low self-esteem, boredom, and frustration. But when the surge of pleasure wears off, the sentiments that the consumer was attempting to avoid resurface stronger than ever, so they are forced to repeat the cycle, developing a full-fledged addiction.
Precognitive dreams
If you think that you dreamed about some event before the event occurred you are not alone, 17.8% to 38% of people reported that they experienced at least one precognitive dream according to some studies.
To classify dream as precognitive it must the these criteria:
Dream must be told or recorded before its fulfillment
Dream must include enough details to render chance fulfillment unlikely
The possibility of interference from actual knowledge must be excluded
Self-fulfilling prophecies must be excluded
Telepathic influences can not explain the occurrence of the precognitive dream
Although I had few dreams about future events as a child, I would usually discard any *paranormal* thoughts with generic explanation of “deja vu”, after all the events were usually random snapshots of my life, nothing worth recording, talking or thinking about. Unfortunately because I didn't record them, I can't call them precognitive but that changed in middle school. One day I had a dream that I am siting in the locker room of the gym, I just had the shower and I am now putting on my clothes. While sitting alone I look in front of me and there is a big window with view to the west side of city, reddish sunlight illuminates white buildings that I had never seen from that angle and I feel slightly disappointed because I expected that I will be able to see the stadium.
At the time I was going to that gym with one friend who was also my classmate, one day while we were in locker room I told him about the dream in one of our *small talks*. Dream was weird because our gym had locker room on east side of the mall so there is no way that window with view on the west side of city can exist.
Fast forward a few years, I am finishing really hard academic year at university, since exams were over I had enough time for the gym again. In the meantime gym was renovated, they expanded over the whole last floor of the mall and now locker room is on the west side of the building. After training sessions and showering I found myself sitting in the locker room looking through the window in front of me with clothes in my hand. I see white buildings that I had never seen from that angle illuminated by reddish sunlight. Fascinated by the view I try to find the angle from witch stadium will be visible but with no success, so I think to myself “*shame that stadium isn't visible from here*”. At that moment, I remembered that I had had a dream about the whole thing. That thought was like the switch that brought back the memory of that dream. This time I know that it is not “deja vu” because I told my friend about that dream, so I had the “record” of it, that was my first and only dream that fills all criteria for precognitive dream.
While reading about this phenomena I found out few interesting historical records that blew my mind, here are most interesting examples.
**Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand:**
On June 28, 1914, Monseigneur Joseph de Lanyi, Bishop of Grosswarden, had a terrifying dream, in which he saw a letter bordered in black lying on his desk. The letter bore the arms of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who had at one time been his pupil. In the dream, the Bishop opened the letter and saw a strange drama being enacted. The Archduke was sitting in the car with his wife, while a crowd milled around outside. A man stepped out of the crowd and fired two bullets into the car.
Superimposed on this scene were the words of the letter:
*Your Eminence, dear Dr. Lanyi, my wife and I have been victims of a political crime at Sarajevo. We commend ourselves to your prayers. Sarajevo. June 28, 1914. 4 A.M.*
The Bishop woke up trembling, looked at his clock and saw that it was 4:30 A.M. He got up immediately and wrote down the details of his dream, which he dispatched in a letter to his brother, Professor Edouard de Lanyi. Later that morning, about ten hours after the Bishop's dream, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were murdered at Sarajevo as they sat in an automobile. Two bullets were fired, one of them fatally wounding the royal couple.
**Aberfan disaster:**
In 1966, a landslide of waste from a coal mine slid into the South Wales village of Aberfan. The local school was destroyed by the landslide, killing 144 students and teachers. A British psychiatrist, John Barker, came to the village shortly after the landslide. Barker was researching what happens to people when they believe they’re about to die. He collected 76 accounts of premonitions of the Aberfan landslide, 60 of which he followed up on.
A notable premonition was submitted by the parents of Eryl Mai, a 10-year-old girl killed in the accident. The day before the accident, the child had reported to her mother a frightening dream. She had dreamed that her school was no longer there and that it had been covered by “something black.”
**Assassination of Abraham Lincoln:**
President Abraham Lincoln reportedly dreamed of his own death. Lincoln’s friend and law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, later described the dream as Lincoln recounted it to him. Lincoln dreamed of people sobbing, and in his dream, he went to investigate. In the East Room of the White House, he found a corpse dressed for a funeral. Lincoln asked the figures in the dream what happened. One reported to him that the president was assassinated. In reporting this dream to Lamon, Lincoln appeared disturbed and frightened. Later, Lincoln clarified the dream to Lamon. The president assassinated in his dream was not Lincoln himself, but some other president. This was the dream he had just nights before his assassination on April 14, 1865.
As you see all three events here are tragedies and this is the case with most of the historical recorded premonitions. I think that this is because people are more likely to write about them if they are about tragic events, that gives impression that premonitions are generally warnings but I would not say so. From my experience I would say that hey are something like “checkpoints” in our lives, sings of big changes or some important experience.
Over the course of my life, I had 3 more dreams that I unfortunately didn't record before fulfillment, which is necessary to differentiate precognitive dreaming from other phenomena such as deja vu experiences, memory distortions, and merely chance occurrences.
In one dream, I was standing near a roundabout looking at the tunnel behind it. The tunnel was really weirdly shaped, something between a V-shaped and a U-shaped tunnel. It was illuminated by orange lights from the inside, and you could see the end of it since it was straight. As I was looking at it, one golden sports car was driving in a circle on a roundabout like it was on display in the shop. An unusual tunnel shape etched that dream in my memory. I was thinking about it after waking up because, from the engineering perspective, shape did not have optimal force distribution like a standard U shape, and it seemed like the wrong choice for the tunnel.
A few months later, I was on a trip to Budapest with my friends. As I was looking around the city I saw one weird-looking tunnel. I had the feeling that I had seen it before, but I ignored it and continued walking. My friend stayed behind me because he was taking pictures. When I noticed that we were more than 30 feet apart, I stopped for a few seconds so that he can catch up with me. When he came near me, he started showing me the images while describing how one sports car was almost "posing*"* at the moment he was taking the picture of the tunnel.
The other two dreams were fulfilled on the same day when I visited Kiev. In one of them, I was waking in the ruins of the city at night and came across a big empty paved area. In the middle of that area, there is a huge concrete arch illuminated by reflectors around it. While looking at the top of the arch I see a big crack that was so perfect that I had the impression it was made on purpose. While looking at it, I couldn't believe that arch was still standing. When I awoke, I had a lot of questions: why would someone build an arch in the middle of an empty space, why would someone intentionally make crack in it, how didn't it collapse and why did I have this strange dream?
Then, after a few days, I found myself in Kiev. It is night time and I am exploring the city. I saw a big arch in the distance, and it looked like something worth checking out. After few minutes of walking I came in front of it, I was mindblown when I saw the crack at the top. It instantly associated me on a dream I had. The crack was created with black paint, and during the night it looks like real crack on first glance.
Unfortunately, I did not come to any satisfying conclusions about this phenomenon. In the scientific literature, precognition is explained by a combination of paranormal beliefs, selective recall, tolerance for ambiguity, coincidence, and subconscious connections. But from my personal experience, I would say that some of these dreams have just too many details for fulfillment by chance. Take for example the case of Bishop Lanyi and try to explain it by scientific rationalisation.
So, if you believe you have frequent precognitive dreams, start recording them in a dream diary (digital format, so you can easily search them by keywords), and you'll have proof that you're not crazy.
Tell The Truth
Few years ago while I was still a student hungry for the self-improvement I had the luck to discover Jordan Peterson and his work. His book “12 rules for life” helped me to crystallize the image of a man I want to be, and it encouraged me to invest more of my free time in reading books of a similar type. Rules in the book were really simple at the first glance, but Jordan did the great work in expanding the meaning and reasoning behind them, one rule really resonated with me, that was the rule 8:
Tell The Truth – Or At Least Don’t Lie*.*
First thing that you might notice is really convenient addition of "or *at least don’t lie*" that enables you to *plead the fifth* or just weasel out of uncomfortable situations by using half-truths as a substitute for lies. "**Tell the truth"** is what I will be selling you in this article because it is short and simple rule to implement and yet it gives enormous results in short time. Here are my two main selling points:
It will significantly increase your self-esteem
It will save you a lot of time (most precious asset that you have)
To make yourself stronger you first need to realize how weak you really are, think about that treacherous feeling in your gut while you give false impression of compliance to a groupthink, saying yes when you want to say no, telling your boss all that crap that he wants to hear instead of what he should hear, lying to temporarily avoid consequences you are afraid of... Weakness is the strongest motive behind all those lies accompanied by shame and paid by your time and self-esteem. Sometimes it is not so simple to identify this weakness, often your mind will form some rationalization as a fig leaf on why it is better that you did what you did as it is easier than admitting how pathetic you really are.
Once you become aware of this it becomes hard to ignore it, when you look at lies as a pathetic characteristic of a weak man you start to despise them. That feeling of despise although not virtuous was a great motivator for me and you really need that because telling truth is not always an easy thing to do. Some situations that you could solve with a simple lie are now complicated, worst thing for me was to say "no" to people because I knew that next question will be "why not" and than I will have to say what I really think. In one such situation I told my boss that I will not go to one convention (that boss was shilling for weeks) and on question "why not" I told that I am not interested and I see it as a time-wasting event. The problem here was real possibility of consequences for honest opinion, but I knew that I was right. I was on that convention in the past and I couldn't justify spending two days on it when in that same time you can learn much more about same topics online. The thing is telling truth might be hard, but it is never wrong and you will never make mistake by doing so. The stronger the consequences that you risk by telling the truth the more self-esteem you get as a reword and whatever happens you can look yourself in the mirror knowing that you did the right thing. By doing this you are forced to defend your word and stick up for yourself, every win in this "battle" is the food for your self-esteem.
Peterson sums this up in one of his talks:
*If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.*
Another great benefit of telling the truth is that it saves everyone’s time. Time you spend on making your lies consistent, remembering things that didn't happen, doing stuff that you didn't want to do and so on, all that time will be your free time. Take, for example, people that engage in catfishing, how much of their and victims time they waste just to face **inevitable** truth in the end. Other great example are people that use "maybe" as substitute for "no" when invited on some event, it gives you enough hope to reserve time for them just to get some flimsy explanation on why they "cant come" in the last minute. They use that tactic because it is easier than saying "no" to a friend, motive behind it is not malicious it is just weakens. As the bible says:
*Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ Anything more comes from the evil one.*
Gradually you will become increasingly comfortable with the truth. Your actions will be less aligned with desire to win approval of others, that might result in loss of some "friends" but it will straighten the relationship with your real friends, no more time wasted on people that do not deserve it. You will become a relevant person, and people will see value and authenticity in things that you have to say. This will all reflect on the image that you have about yourself and you will become happier person in the end. **The truth will literally set you free.**
Ultimate sacrifice
I am not sure how responsible it is to write about this philosophical poison but I will try to deconstruct it in a way that will leave you in neutral state before and after reading it.
Before we get to the meritum of this topic I will define abstraction called "scope" (for the lack of the better word). Scope is the relevant range of concepts that are directly related and closely associated with the topic of the scope.
So for example scope of business career would include concepts of job, promotions, salaries, vacations, working benefits... and so on. This abstraction will be important when it comes to determining level of sacrifice. The more you remove from that scope the bigger the sacrifice, goal of ultimate sacrifice is to remove as much as possible in "one move".
If someone asks you what is the ultimate sacrifice that you can make related to your business career, first thing that you will do is to identify most important part of that scope that if eliminated would left the scope almost or completely empty and meaningless, in this case that would be your job.
What is the ultimate sacrifice that human can make? It is obvious right, by removing life from the human being that scope becomes empty and equivalent to the scope of decomposing pile of flesh.
So if your answer is life than you are right... but only if you are atheist.
**To determine the ultimate sacrifice, you need to determine the ultimate scope.** Atheists are limited to the physical scope of human being, on the other hand for believers there is wider scope that includes the abstract concept of soul and afterlife. The interesting thing is that most believers will have the same answer like atheists because they ignore most important part of their beliefs.
If you were to talk about this question with Christians there is high chance that one of the arguments for life as the ultimate sacrifice would be quote from the bible that says that "*there is no greater sacrifice than laying down your life for others*". That quote is often stored in their memory as a oversimplified derivation of the real quote:
*Greater* *****love***** *has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.*
Most Christians would also say that the greatest sacrifice Jesus did was to give his life for our sins, but is that really the biggest sacrifice he did? Scope of God is far bigger than the scope of human being for sure. If you take that into account than answer becomes clear, greatest sacrifice that Jesus did was that he gave up his God powers became a human for 33 years of his whole life. He allowed himself to be weak, suffer and die in pain like human would, he completely emptied the scope of God reducing it to a scope of human and then to corpse for 3 days.
If you are still here, you might ask yourself:
"Why did he say that this is philosophical poison at the beginning, there is nothing toxic here?"
Well, we still didn't answer the main question, what is the ultimate sacrifice human can do?
Imagine that you are a christian during the Diocletianic persecution (303–312) and your neighbor wants to report you to the roman solders, you want to avoid ending up in the arena with few hungry lions at all cost. As a christian, killing the neighbor will put your soul in hell since it is against sixth commandment. Then another christian comes, he takes your sword and says "I will go to hell so you don't have to" before killing the neighbor.
With this logic, crimes can now be the "most virtuous heroic deeds" to correct all kinds of injustices that infuriate you. To make it worse, while browsing the internet this meme found his way to my eyes (image below). That felt like a paranormal event, it is all there in one image, the whole idea that was troubling me for a few months. In that moment my head was full of questions, what is the chance of me finding this marginalized image, how many people think like this, what does this mean, is this a sign that my way of reasoning was right...
Now it should be clear what the sick part of this reasoning is, doing what the devil wants you to do while feeling like a virtuous hero at the same time. This is where my quest for finding an antidote to this idea begins and after thinking about it for few days I think that I finally have the answer.
**Ultimate sacrifice is always wrong thing to do.**
Fallacy of the ultimate sacrifice is that you are sacrificing whole scope for a concept that is part of that scope, in this case if christian sacrifices his soul his scope is reduced to nothing and in that scope of damned soul concept of a hero does not exist. Imagine if Jesus did the **ultimate sacrifice** of his Godly powers and existence **permanently**, as a christian would you like that, can you find any possible scenario in which that would be a right thing to do? Same logic can be applied for christians, scenario that would make sacrificing your soul a "right thing to do" does not exist. Does anything matter if you lose your soul, without your soul as a christian your scope is reduced to nothing yet you would do that sacrifice for the subjective concept of a hero.
As a devils advocate my mind wanted to test the resilience of my conclusion so it came up with interesting hypothetical case:
Image atheist that is captured with his family by terrorists. Terrorists let him choose to sacrifice himself or his family. I previously stated that ultimate sacrifice for an atheist is his life and that ultimate sacrifice is always wrong, but here this doesn't seem to be the case. This got me thinking again, something was wrong and after some time I knew what it was. The concept of a family goes beyond a scope of single man, this means that ultimate scope for the atheist in this case is wider, it doesn't only include his life but also lives of his family. In this binary choice ultimate sacrifice would be the lives of his family, by doing so scope of his life would be empty and that emptiness would be filled with shame and self-hatred which would probably lead to suicide. In the end, ultimate sacrifice is still a bad sacrifice.
I will end with this thought experiment:
Imagine yourself as a part of fictional religion with teachings that eating apples, stealing and throwing any food (including apples) away is sin. You hate seeing people eating apples only because you are a believer of that religion and yet you plan to commit the sin of stealing and throwing all apples in the garbage so that others cant eat them. By throwing food away you can't consider yourself as the member of that religion anymore. Only motive why you did what you did is lost now, you are just a fool who sacrificed everything for nothing left with beliefs that have no foundation and to make it worse you will face legal cares and punishment for stealing those apples.
@Jackal