So, I love TED.com’s videos as they tend to be either inspiring or incredibly informative, or both. I was sent a link to a video called “The Great Porn Experiment” which speaks about the effects of porn, more specifically sourced from high speed Internet connections. Have a watch:
In the video there’s mention of Reddit’s NoFap subred, where a large group of users are banding together to support each other (no 12-step plan yet!) to kick the habit. Doubly inspired, I decided to run with it. I suffer from a fairly shitty case of depression and have experienced most of the symptoms listed in the TED video. Addiction would be the word for it, I can identify with the symptoms from my various research. I’d be ashamed, but if sharing this helps a few more people, then so be it.
First step - remove temptation!
That being done, I stripped bookmarks, subreddits subscriptions, torrent sources and even set the “NSFW” filter on the RES. I’m going for 90 days with no ’net porn to start with, but hopefully the habit will stay away and the advantages will show themselves. The research showed 4-5 months for return to normal function, that’s just… amazing.
I’m going to look into the mechanics of building a Chrome plugin which has a few features:
- The ability to either black list or white list sites.
- A button on the tool bar to add a domain/link to your block list.
- The functionality to then either redirect you to another link - user configurable - but probably defaulting to /r/NoFap, or just showing you a message with kittens. Who doesn’t love kittens?
- An option to crowd-source the blacklist, submitting it to a central location or maybe just synchronising it to your own Dropbox account to support multiple computers
- A suggestion popup that looks at page features and goes “hay guy, whut?”
I feel weird just coming up with this idea, because blocking Internet sites goes against many things in my moral code. The reason I can allow it into my headspace is that it’s not some other magical entity doing it, it’s a personal choice.