New to the site/my story

Just joined the site. Any insights about what I type below would be appreciated, as I'm evaluating my life choices heavily. This is a lot of stuff I have never even discussed anonymously on the internet before.

I've been struggling for a long time. I want love and affection, I just don't try that hard to obtain it. I think the porn has a lot to do with it. Recently started seeing a girl, and we hit it off really well. Due to various circumstances, we didn't try to have sex until about two weeks in. I fell flat. I couldn't keep it up. Of course, she took it very personally, and ultimately we're no longer seeing each other. I actually discussed, not in this amount of depth, my porn addiction and masturbating habits with her, but she ultimately couldn't accept that I had a problem. Sometimes, I think that porn has replaced my love life, and that I'm not interested in real sex because of it.

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I've been looking at porn since I've had dial up internet back in the 90s. I used to print out pictures. Later when videos became available, I would seek those out. Now there are millions of videos readily available.

I don't know when it started, but I started downloading videos. It wasn't enough to just stream them, I have to obtain them, collect them, rate them, rank them. Right now the collection is probably in the hundreds of thousands of videos, more than I could just possibly sit and watch. Sometimes, years ago, I would sign up for a one month trial of a premium site, and download as much of their content as I could.

I used to just have individual videos, and not a huge amount. Now most of the time, it's the particular porn star, if I really like them I will go find and download all of their videos and keep them, sometimes 100+ videos. Typical vanilla porn, unless it's one of those stars I like, has of course become boring to me. I've graduated to various escalated genres, the most disturbing of which are rape fantasy/heroine peril, incest fantasy, and very occassionally bestiality. There are a great many other things I seek out: gangbang, hentai, interracial, etc. The single biggest thing I've been into lately has been a variety of Jerk Off Instruction/Edging type videos, where a woman talks to the camera and tells me what to do.

Recently (about a year and a half ago), I started a hands free masturbation fascination. I would load some of my favorite videos on an old cell phone, and lay in bed, bringing myself completely to orgasm without any touching. I've done this 173 times. How do I know this? Because after I'm done I number the video, tag it, and put it in a folder with the others, and that has become my top tier category, videos so good that can cause me to orgasm without touching.

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I felt like I had to get very specific about my habits, because it's important to understand how far gone I feel. How can I hope to be with a woman when I've escalated this addiction to such enormous heights, when I've refined my porn watching to a science, and I can bring myself incredible orgasms every day? When I was presented with a real woman and a real intimate situation, I couldn't perform, and it was awful and humiliating.

That happened on Sunday. I went home and masturbated afterward, but I haven't since. I have still been downloading porn, but I haven't been watching it, or masturbating to it. I feel weird now, like I'm almost "flatlined", but it's really hard to tell. The temptation to relieve myself is getting much stronger now, even after just five days. The weekend is going to be a true test. I feel like I'm in detox.

Again, any thoughts/insights on my situation would be fantastic. I just signed up for the site today. What happened to me over the weekend has really caused me to introspect and evaluate.

 

You make so much sense on that post, you are absolutely right on so many points. I've thought about the full delete before. You're correct, it is probably around six terabytes. I've tried to cull it before, make it smaller, but it just grows and grows. The way you said it though, yes, somehow it's 10+ years of hard work and a proud personal achievement. It's something that nobody, not one single person, in my life even knows about. If I deleted it today, nobody in my life would know anything had been done. I think I could do it, but even the thought of it now is so unnerving. I'm hopeful for now if I can keep trying to reboot, maybe my head fog will clear enough for me to take that plunge. I know deleting all of that would be an incredible rush. Of course even beyond that it would be deleting the stuff that's backed up, destroying the burned discs etc. And then what's to stop me from just starting fresh...ugh, it's frustrating.

 

External HDD + I have 10 TB of internal HDD space. If I have visits I just unplug the USB for the external (it's not visible on my desk). The stuff on my computer is on an encrypted partition with no drive letter that I mount when I want to use it.

I can't delete it. Not yet. I think I need to get to a place where it's not as important to me. That's only going to come with less and less time going to that well.