The Lord of the Rings Challenge

bad move bro. punishment = shame = pressure = relapse.

block or avoid those activities if they constitute a trigger or they don´t appeal to you anymore. don´t punish yourself, there´s no point in depriving yourself of fun. make your life happy brother . you got to switch for the better, not for the worst

 

no, wet dreams are beyond counscious control, not a relapse. and it´s very likely that they´re going to happen

 

it´s seems we´re side by side again my brother. Let´s do this!!

 

that´s not gonna happen bro. life is totally unpredictable. if you´re gonna wait until "better days ahead", then you´re gonna wait forever. plus if you stay in pmo waiting for less stressful days, pmo itself increases anxiety, so it´s not a good deal.

instead develop coping skills to deal with anxiety. stress is part of life my brother, is up to you to find ways to deal with it.

 

that´s the way i relapse 2 days ago bro. watch out.

you got to find a good plan to activate if you´re triggered and can´t sleep. reflect and define a strategy my brother, because another sleepless night can be just around the corner.

 

brother, the reboot must be your top priority in life. if you´re not staying accountable, you´re falling short.

 

Checking in my brave Fellowship . Feeling tired and a little foggy, but notheless my social anxiety is down (instead of high), so i guess those 35 days of semen retention really payed out and i´m still harvesting the benefits . i hope the withdrawal will be light

Feeling ready to boost you again. Shall we do this??? . Let´s go.

Let´s welcome our new member:

@modern milarepa


Our brother @Revanthegrey has reached the Misty Mountains. Congratulations bro, keep it up!!!


and @MyGodandMyAll27 - Lothlorien / Wilderland. Carry on my brother


Some time ago a brother called Instagram the Witch-King of Angmar. Here´s an interesting post about Instagram and it´s 10th anniversary, that another brother posted on a sub-section of the nofap forum.

Have a great day brave Fellowship!!! Love you all


"Instagram is the new porn

Instagram turned ten years old not very long ago (it was originally released on October 6th, 2010).
As a porn addict, I've struggled a lot with Instagram. It's like that bad influence that tells a recovering alcoholic "come on, it's just a drink, take at least one sip". Going into Instagram was often a slippery slope and it has triggered me to relapse on more than one occasion, to the point where I decided to pretty much not use it anymore.

However, Instagram wasn't always like that.
To commemorate its anniversary, I decided to write a story about Instagram's history. But, instead of focusing on all the great achievements that everybody else was writing about, I placed the focus on something else: the evolution of its content, towards more and more sexualized material.
I wanted to share with you guys a summarized version of the story so that we can reflect on what Instagram has become for many of us, and hopefully call out some of the negative consequences its content has on the users in general, and on people that are struggling with an addiction to porn like us in particular.

--------------------------------

An article from the New York Times described Instagram on June 3rd, 2011 as a platform where people would "snap and post pictures of anything, like pretty wallpaper at a restaurant or artsy close-ups of their cat climbing on the bed in the morning, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their lives".

This is pretty much how I remember it. Back then, the idea that I had of Instagram was that it was an app for people that didn’t know much about photography but liked to pretend they did. However, as people moved in from Facebook and other social media platforms, its idiosyncrasy started to shift.
Although the social aspect had been a key part of Instagram from the beginning and selfies were abundant in the platform since day one, going mainstream pressed on the transition towards more self-centered content, and the artsy pictures began to fade away from the average user’s profile. Eventually, that culture of self-promotion boomed, giving birth to the world of models and influencers that make up a core part of what we know as Instagram today.

In the original story, I use Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez's profiles as a way to illustrate this shift in content. They both currently rank in the top ten accounts with the most followers on the platform, and their profiles are generally a phenomenal display of narcissism, with them starring in pretty much all the posts, whether it's selfies, promotional images, or sexy photoshoots. However, if you go back to 2011 or 2013, the years when they each joined Instagram, you find a completely different kind of content: random scenes from their day-to-day lives, sceneries, normal pictures with friends...
Certainly these two profiles do not alone prove my point, but the trend is bigger than them, and I’ve personally seen it in profiles of all kinds (celebrities or not). I myself joined Instagram in 2016, when the platform wasn’t too different from what it is today, and yet, moved by my outdated mental image of what I thought the app was, I fired up my profile with a series of pastel color pictures of city locations and tall trees against clear skies, trying really hard to look like another cool guy in the coolest social network. It was only after some time that I looked around me and realized the kind of place I was really in. I started to adapt and my profile followed, featuring myself and my friends more and more, and even adding a couple of selfies to the mix.

Like me, many people have transitioned at some point towards more self-centered content. For some, that evolution ended up leading to sexually charged profiles more akin to a lingerie catalog than to a social media account. None of this is surprising, and it’s easy to understand where it all comes from.

--------------------------------

In an effort to provide some background that helps understand what’s leading Instagram’s content evolution, I devised a little fun experiment to prove one of the oldest and most widely accepted maxims: that sex sells.

The experiment is very simple. I analyzed a series of Instagram posts, ranking them based on how much of the person is revealed in the image, then making a note of how many likes it gets. The idea, of course, is to study the correlation between how sexualized a post is and how popular it gets on the app. To keep it varied, I used profiles belonging to six, very differentiated categories: celebrities, fashion, fitness, food, travel, and regular users (i.e. friends of mine that are not influencers).
The chart below shows the overall results when taking all the profiles into account.



There is a significant correlation between the exposure level and the relative number of likes. In other words, the results confirm what most of you already knew: that people like your sexy selfies better than your pictures of the sunset.

I also broke the results down into their respective categories, to see the differences between users that follow each type of account. The correlation was strong in all the categories, with one exception: food. Apparently, users that follow these profiles do not care much about your pictures posing next to the food or the selfies you take while cooking it. Even though this might sound obvious, it’s really just a breath of fresh air in a platform where, even in the most aseptic niches, users are fighting to stay relevant through personal self-promotion. After all, why would people that are into traveling be more interested in your picture of the Macchu Picchu when you are posing shirtless in it? And even more oddly, why would a fashion fan like your pictures better the fewer clothes you wear?

Driven by their lust for likes and aware of the shortcuts to get them, Instagram users began to post content that was more and more revealing. The plethora of self-proclaimed professional influencers around them only motivated some users even further, in a search for followers that had the potential to turn into a way to make a living.

And it is at this point that Instagram's recommendation algorithm kicks in to speed things up. Because sex sells and users are likely to click on and like pictures of half-naked, attractive people, the algorithm learns to feed you more and more of that content and to prioritize it over other less sexualized posts. After a while, this has the potential to turn your Instagram into a softcore porn app.

--------------------------------

I know it because that’s what my Instagram used to be. As a user, I was never too interested in my friends’ boring attempts to fake a fancy lifestyle or into the latest pop star's album photoshoot, but my simple brain sure was drawn to that pop star’s tits and my friend’s booty. After a while, and despite me never actually liking or commenting on any of these posts, the algorithm caught on my creepy lust through my clicks, viewing times, and visits to profiles, and started doing its work.

The results were most noticeable in my Instagram’s Explore section, which by all appearances is fed by the same algorithm that populates the newsfeed. Varied pictures of celebrities, trips to Ha Long Bay, and aerial views of low-carb meals were slowly being replaced by more and more posts of female models and influencers in sexy outfits. I was a laboratory mouse in Instagram’s own twisted version of the Rat Park, an oblivious participant in the experiment they had set up to identify the perfect conditions to keep me as addicted to their app as possible. Every click on those posts reinforced the algorithm’s strategy, and soon enough my Explore section was fully populated by sexualized content, looking more like an issue of Playboy (at least one from that short period in 2016 where the magazine stopped featuring full-frontal nudity) than a display of social recommendations.

As a person that has been struggling for many years with a crippling addiction to Internet porn, this was more than just a nuisance for me. Browsing through Instagram was often a triggering experience that would get me horny and eventually lead me to watch porn. I'm therefore not surprised to see in this forum how an increasingly popular piece of advice given to the newcomers is to either uninstall Instagram or use it with forethought. I noticed this pattern within myself, and, realizing how little else the app was bringing to my life, I decided to remove it altogether. Never having been a very active user, this wasn’t a very traumatic decision for me, but I still must say that I do not miss it a tiny bit.

--------------------------------

Instagram’s growing sexualization is, of course, not a unique problem. It’s common to other social media platforms, TikTok and its army of teenage dancers being one of the latest examples. It is not exclusive to social apps either. Much has been said throughout the years about the increasing sexualization of all types of media, from magazines to television shows, commercials, and movies. The phenomenon has often been conveniently tied to the sexual liberation movement and capitalized from it. However, there is a great difference between the open discussion and wide acceptance of sex in all its forms, and the exploitation of a human soft spot as a marketing tool for corporate benefit — and it’s an important difference to make.

I don’t consider myself to be a prude. I’m not a religious person either. I’m an advocate of quality sex education to get rid of repression and taboos, and I defend everybody’s freedom to enjoy sex with whoever they like and in whatever fashion they fancy. And, at the same time, I would like to condemn the indiscriminate and widespread use of sexualized imagery in the media and the negative consequences it has on all of us, particularly on the youth. These are not incompatible stances nor should they ever be treated as such.

Instagram has truly come a long way since it started as a platform to share artsy pictures. Throughout its incredible evolution, it lost its original essence in favor of a more self-obsessed and sexualized culture, some of whose characteristics and negative implications we have discussed here. It is now on their hands, as much as it’s on ours, to pivot away from the current trend. Only then will Instagram reconcile with what it has always been — a platform that truly connects and enhances people’s lives — as opposed to a mere catalog of softcore material to masturbate to. In other words, an app that we can all love and enjoy, and not just the new porn."