Why time counting is garbage

Okay the title is meant to get your attention, but still it is only useful on a very superficial, basic level.

Just think about this: Does puberty matter with any form of sex addiction? Does being exposed to porn before, during, vs. after that make a difference? Does an existing addiction before someone gets into a relationship vs. after matter?

I think anyone with basic reasoning faculties would obviously have to recognize it does, but that doesn't have to do with X number of days or years. We can say there are both biological and psychological developmental fulcrums and X number of days or years, both in active addiction and abstinence isn't the same for people depending on their life circumstances and how the addiction formed.

If anything, we need a lot longer than days for it to make a significant difference.

By all means we should have a measurement, but just as the length of a movie doesn't tell you how good it is neither does the day count of a streak tell you how good the recovery is. It may tell you *something* worked to go that long in time but that doesn't automatically translate to anything useful or good.

 

The point about movies is it's a journey, things happen. It's an analogy. It is entirely possible to have a fairly long streak without much of anything happening, I've done it before. (6 months) There is no need to waste that much time just to relapse after that if you have a good quality reboot.

The idea of keeping going is also not that helpful. HOW can you keep going? Most people ask about the moment of strong urge which may be the one time where there's no good answer, but if you're actually willing to put a plan together before that you might actually be able to go further- but probably not if the only "technique" is just tracking a day count.

 

It does, in the context you gave. It also has meaning on the basis of what they say FOLLOWING the day count, their actual share and story. All those people have a life and even the guy with 6 days has something to share besides the time. The share is what's meaningful, I would even go so far as to say them being in the room is. Not as much when it's just a gamification online.

 

If that was the case then the actual shares are irrelevant, clearly that is not the case. I also already addressed this in the context of the rest of that post.

 

Just so we're clear, look at it from this perspective: That doesn't mean the advice of people who have a lot of time are not helpful. And yes, of course for a lot of people that's the only way they can identify something that might be worth trying, even if you can just say something very reasonable that's equally true without them already knowing how much time you have - but of course it's a matter of them giving weight to it more when they know that number even though you'd be the same person with the same experience and the advice is the same. It's perception in that case.

 

It's useful for sure, but what I mean by basic is how it functions. As I said above it's largely perception. I admit garbage is cheap attention getting for the thread.

All things being equal, more time is better than less. But experience, strength and hope should be based on more than projection over a number. The pitfall is if someone is reading your advice on a superficial level just because you have the days instead of really paying close attention based on what it says, which is of course on the reader, then it's not going to help them that much.

So maybe we can say break it down three ways: There's the person saying it, the person reading it, and just what is said. The counter on the site is just an automated thing, it's just there. It's very simple computer code. In that sense, it is certainly basic. Human experience is not or should not be, so in that sense it is what we do with it or whether we're aware of what we're doing with it.

 

And my experience is the second sentence is often one designed to implicate other people even if it is framed as an "I statement" - it is talking about other people even if made in a general, non-specific way. It adheres to the "letter of the law" in terms of not speaking for others as far as the wording but the intent is questionable. Really it happens enough in the rooms it's not that hard to recognize. It of course implies a judgment of those people you interacted with. Unless there is a literal tracking or inventory of so many people making such a statement vs. those who don't, which would just be a fact, frankly I think it is quite possibly confirmation bias and completely subjective. A statistical count would be fine but of course taking other peoples inventory in the 4th step, recovery sense is problematic because you don't have the whole picture, and is consistent with the pattern of one piece of information taken out of context.

Your first statement is telling. Even you didn't say it is the only factor even if you say it is the most important one. Also, you used the word drug. PMO is a behavior. Yes on one level "all addictions are the same", but if you were speaking to someone who has experience in drug addiction but no experience in PMO or sex addiction, vs. yourself who does, do you really feel your experience is exactly the same? And regarding experience:

I made that statement to illustrate a point, I didn't say it is exclusively knowledge nor is it the only thing I said. You'll notice elsewhere I already talked about experience.

Yes, and embodiment cannot be seen directly online. As you say a long streak reflects this, I would go even further to make your point - your posts and body of posts online also only reflects this, and the streak is of course only one small piece of information that makes up that body of information online about a particular person. We don't know how someone actually lives, carries themselves and go about their day other than what they write. Sure you can infer a lot but the point is it's all indirect information.

Really the simple point is there is a big picture, the day count is in there but there's a bigger scheme of things. And sharing and writing about your experience is the specifics. It is not hard to imagine in this age of short attention span and many distractions online people may only see the number and ignore a lot of what you share whether that's knowledge or experience, and that is the problematic thing. I'm pretty sure nobody ever got good recovery by overlooking the details of what their sponsor/mentor says but just focusing on a time count. (which is of course traditionally in terms of years rather than days) I would never mention this in an actual 12 Step meeting because there are those relationships with good communication but a lot of this is about it being online and how things are lost in translation.

 

Actually I could also go with what seems to be the opposite and say count away - just count EVERYTHING. I recently came across a quote that basically says there are two mistakes in life: not starting and not finishing. If there's more than one addiction, especially when they interact like just general internet addiction that would obviously interact with PMO, by all means count that. What I don't think works is taking one piece of information out of context. Piecing together different pieces of information, even though we know it's incomplete but with the intention of dealing with all of it instead of putting outsized emphasis on one thing is different.

So maybe we can have multiple counters, I guess what you'd call a NoSurf count and a NoFap count. It would be interesting to look at that on a graph and see how the two might look together. Of course surfing is much harder to measure, it's basically a matter of distraction and everyone may have slightly different measures - I'd be open to hearing peoples thoughts on how that can be done. I don't mean just amount of time online but the activity of mindlessly surfing or even something like getting into arguments on social media that obviously doesn't have to do with the topic but just people hating on each other using that topic as an excuse. And it would basically be two things instead of being overwhelmed with other things like substance addiction, even caffeine and sugar like some people sometimes ask about quitting everything.

 

There's also another aspect of it, which is whether that person can do any service given the perception or even official policy. There are some groups where they qualify people based on a minimum amount of sobriety time, but if someone with that much time isn't in the group that doesn't mean the people who want to create a community should not make some kind of effort, have meetings and so forth. And online, if someone with a long streak does slip, should all the good posts they made before they slipped be ignored? The relapse report itself can have value even, the honesty and perspective - but this is not going to be seen as valuable if someone looking at it in terms of high count=good/low count=bad. (or seen at all, since they may just look no further) Some people include past streaks in their signature but if someone doesn't, a reader that doesn't know that can easily take it at face value, not knowing just a few days before that person was on a 1 year+ streak and more to the point, they've contributed a ton to the site in times past.

I mean seriously, people don't go back to the archives as a matter of course. More often we see people saying they don't know where to start or just would rather have someone reply to their post than look up something that may be already there, or even think up key words to search with. So as unfortunate as it is I think we have to recognize this is just sort of the norm of our digital reality.