Commencement

Explain your current situation to your five-years-ago self.

I find this task quite appealing. Right now I’m on an all time high so to speak. But let’s start at the beginning…

Greetings, Year-2010-Me!

You will find a particular genre of music you can identify with extremely well. Not just the music but also the whole mentality behind it. You will discover your love for festivals in the near future. Actually there are a lot to come, and almoste every single one has something worth remembering. You will have the best time, but you’ll also discover that something is missing. Something you can’t identify yet. Actually it will take almost five years from now until you’ll be truly fulfilled.

You’ll make the right decision to switch your company you work for, even though it sometimes feels a little off.

One evening you will dabble in random clips on the internet and you’ll discover a TED-talk video called “The great porn experiment”. You’ll watch it and think “Wow, there are truly some fucked up people out there who have weird issues like internet porn addiction. Luckily I’m not one of them”.

Jumping a few months ahead. There’s nothing in particular that is wrong with your life, it’s just that you’ll stagnate on a certain level and you’ll get the feeling that maybe there’s something wrong with you. You can’t locate it but the feeling keeps getting stronger over the months to come. Then, one evening with loads and loads of motivation juice leaving your body you’ll come to realize that maybe, just maybe you are addicted to internet porn as well. Why is your life so boring or something is missing? Why do you never leave your comfort zone? Why do you avoid everything that is new and especially why is it so fucking hard to talk to girls? And why the fuck didn’t you realize earlier that you can’t abstain even one week from the internet without looking for new jack-off material??

You once again look up that Brain-on-Porn-video and suddenly there’s a tiny spark inside you that just got ignited. The more you get into the material, the more obvious it becomes that there is a connection between anxiety, demotivation and porn usage. Suddenly everything becomes clear and within a week you decide to start a new journey called ‘nofap’ in hopes of controlling your porn habits. It’s exactely that moment that will define who you are in the next 2 years. Everything resolves around nofap and you’ll experience a shift in paradigm in the month to come. You’ll learn what discipline truly means. There will be setbacks, there will be relapses. You become used to working out and get in shape, You’ll stay at it, even though the first six months are an absolute nightmare regarding fitness and stamina and after every exercise session you’ll feel like shit. But you’ll get through it and today there’s no way you can imagine a world without exercise.

You will become content with yourself. You don’t care about what others are thinking of you. You will just live your life the right way, you will join clubs, you will try out new activities and broaden your mind by leaving your comfort zone more and more often.

In the end, nofap becomes something irrelevant. Not because you don’t believe in it anymore but because you don’t need it anymore.

Hmm, when thinking about the last 5 years eveything seems so surreal. I can’t exactely describe it right now and my guess is that I will nevery truly understand how everything came together. The past will always be the past and you can’t change it anyway, so why bother?

Have a nice weekend!

//Edit: I’m currently realizing that my description of the last five years weren’t that hard to write down. There are certainly stories out there which aren’t that positive and my guess is that those stories are a lot harder to write down because with it comes the awareness that you fucked up on a certain level. But lying to yourself and say everything is fine in the first place I think doesn’t help as well… the task assesses your life and maybe lead you to another path in the future…