Trying to understand "spermatogenesis" process

Ignore fappers and ignore those who tell you that nofap is some kind of miracle that will give you superpowers. The best thing about nofap is forgetting you are on nofap. You will find yourself relapsing more often when you’re counting days/thinking about nofap all day, while you will stop even associating horniness with masturbation when you stop associating the two behaviors and you start investing your energy into other things that are constructive in the ling term. You have to absolutely work out regularly when on nofap (best way to expend excess energy) and you need to develop your discipline. If you can truly put into practice what you *want* and not what you feel/don’t feel like doing, you’ll be invincible and free, and nofap is just a practical demonstration of such freedom, as you will stop even “needing” to jerk off or following all these idols and addictions that people follow, you’ll just realize how worthless and meaningless all these little drugs and illusions of happiness are once you start finding true meaning, always remember to think with clear head and independently (freely) from the very same instincts and passions that would sway you into bending your will to their satisfaction.

Stay strong.

 

It takes humans around 60 days to make a sperm cell, and it is made in the testicles; there are millions of them made every day, but they are not really mature, it's like a prepubescent baby sperm, so not much of use—it lacks motility and ability to fertilize an egg. After those 60 days however it is mature enough to leave the testicles and it goes into epididymis (if you've ever examined your testicles, that's the soft part inside the scrotum, attached to your balls, along with a tube attached to epididymis, called vas deferens, through which it leaves epididymis when it is time to ejaculate). There it stays for another 10 days or so, slowly moving from one epididymis compartment to the next (there are 3 compartments—head, body and tail) until it is mature enough to finally go into the last compartment (tail) of epididymis, where it awaits the ejaculation, at which point it enters the tube and leaves scrotum.

I like to think of it by using an analogy of a gun:
Testicles (a pack of ammo) -> epididymis (loaded magazine) -> vas deferens (chamber of a gun).

If the ejaculation does not happen then it dies of old age and is reabsorbed by epididymis and broken down by the body for nutrition.

There is couple things to this. Firstly, while it is true that no matter how often you ejaculate you will always have some sperm left, it is also true that sperm count drops after frequent ejaculation and rises after a period of abstinence, up to a point where fertility doctors sometimes even recommend men with low sperm count to abstain for few days when trying to conceive a child, all though this is not necessary for men with normal sperm counts. But my point is that while there seems to be a limit of how low you can go on sperm count, there is also such thing as a surplus.

Secondly, your body will always pull material from it's stored reserves to produce sperm: selenium, zinc, etc. But it is more than just about vitamins and minerals, which you can be replaced through supplements or food; sperm cells contain massive amount of genetic material needed to create a human being, aka your DNA. So wouldn't it make sense to reabsorb it, instead of throwing that DNA in a tissue, and keep pulling more and more DNA material from your chromosomes, shortening your telomeres?

And thirdly, most of the semen retention stans have gotten it wrong. They talk about sperm, and while I do think sperm retention is beneficial, like I said above, most of the immediate benefits of retaining comes from our hormonal system. It has nothing to do with reabsorption of sperm cells. It is simply that the orgasm and ejaculation is a massive hormonal reset. So when you retain you will experience a lot of the benefits that all those retainers are talking about, because you are keeping your nervous system highly charged. That is where all the sexual energy is coming from, not the sperm cell.

 

Not just when creating new sperm, telomeres shorten during all cell replication. There's a study that I quickly googled for you: Reproduction predicts shorter telomeres and epigenetic age acceleration. It's on women though, so take that with a grain of salt as a male; I don't think there is much, if anything, on human males (but you are free to look for more information about this, the Google Scholar is a good place to start, it's like Google only for research). I remember reading a study done on mice and insects, but can't find it now—that pretty much gives you a picture of how much the science of effects of ejaculation frequency is in it's infancy, that the best I can do is mention mice. So a lot of this is theoretical, that being said we do know that there is a negative correlation between fecundity and lifespan of species (there's a short little article on it with a link to wider study about it: Those who live longer have fewer children), so I think it's reasonable to assume that this might be also true for individual members of species in a single lifespan. And to assume that if telomere shortening is true for women then it might also be true for men.

I have heard about androgen receptors too, don't remember much about it though.
I don't know if there is such thing as good or bad, I think it's just about what kind of effect you want to accomplish in your biology—if you want to relax and go to sleep then massive release of prolactin would probably help. I am not a doctor or anything so I would recommend Huberman Lab Podcast, that guy is a neuroscience professor at Stanford, so he knows his stuff and can explain how hormonal system works way better than I can. I don't think he has an episode on nofap or semen retention specifically, but he often mentions these things briefly in context. Check out these two episodes for start: #15 and #12.