Interpreting your failures, and a different look at the NoFap movement

I have a set of hypotheses about how one should go from their current station in life to somewhere better. I get to test them on myself constantly; exclusively in a lot of ways. Sure, I can talk about my ideas with others, even beckoning them to try it themselves. Any good experimenter should have multiple trials to test a hypothesis. But at the end of the day, without advanced brain imaging technology - as well as a constant live-stream of another's actions - only I get to know how a certain mindset, a set of beliefs, affects oneself in the Real World.

One of my hypotheses is this: every failure has a useful interpretation, and finding it is the correct way of rewriting limiting beliefs and changing your actions for the better. The contrapositive is as follows: useless actions and limiting beliefs can be successfully developed by unproductive interpretations of your failures. It's not clear how to define 'useful' and 'unproductive' in this sense, but through some examples the difference will become clear.

I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't heard of the word "contrapositive" before; or maybe you have, but couldn't apply it. It's a logical word. Logic is not taught very well, or at all, to people growing up. Herein, I believe, lies the root cause of people's faulty interpretations of their failures. Failures are interpreted emotionally, resulting in stubborn, knee-jerk solutions that have short-term appeal but no long-term merit. Your consciousness is the politician of your mind. And without scrupulous fact-checking, his lies will run amok.

A typical failure a lot people have relates to addictions and vices; specifically, giving in to them. As an example, I can't help but pick on one of the internet's most infamous (and in a lot of ways, most comical) shared maladies: the No Fap movement. The premise is simple: excessive masturbation, particularly with the aid of pornography, is bad. Is that so hard to agree with? I think not, there's a myriad of reasons to accept this premise. For one, it's a waste of time (unless you happen to be working in the industry). Secondly, there's this pseudo-scientific argument about overstimulation being "bad" for you. I certainly agree that spending too much time doing something incredibly exciting in the short-term is going to detract from your discipline to perform actions for the long-term. We'll touch on this more later though, no pun intended.

But here is where our philosophies - myself and the movement - begin to diverge. The interpretation of the problem is crucial to finding the right solution. Their interpretation is essentially this: if we work to control our addictions, our lives will get better. Reading between the lines a bit, this is equivalent to saying that 'our addictions are ruining our lives'. This violates a key principle of success: not having a victim mentality. I am a victim because of the environment I'm in; there's all this good porn and hand moisturizer, what's a guy supposed to do?

So their solution is to abstain for as many days in a row as possible, until a "relapse" event, at which point they reset their counter badge back to zero and start again. There are a lot of problems inherent to this approach as well. Days in a row could be a useful proxy for improvement, but consider this. What's worse, some guy watching 10 minutes of porn every other day, or someone who abstains for a week then goes on a 3 hour marathon? Why not try a ladder-detox approach, something like, do your regular amount, then start to reduce by 10 minutes a day? This seems better than walking around twitching and frustrated for days at a time only to lock yourself in the batcave at the end of the week to paint the room a gooey white.

Here is an alternative, and I believe a useful, way of interpreting this problem:

"I am spending too much time masturbating.. Why am I not using that time differently to pursue my passions or improve myself? Why am I always reaching for that quick easy escape? Why am I not having a sexual experience with a partner instead?"

First of all, this 'interpretation' isn't even something definite yet; that's useful, as jumping to a conclusion to something non-obvious (like addictive behavior) has a high probability of being wrong. At the same time though, questions like this really start to make progress towards results. What do I want instead of [this behavior]?

When we view it this way, we start to see that the sufferer has a scarcity of real positive behaviors and experiences, so he goes for the cheap thrill instead. And this is the subtle distinction that gets us out of the victim mentality: excessive masturbation and porn use is a symptom of larger problems, not a cause.

There are more holes in the original interpretation too. It's almost religious in its stupidity. For example, what does one make of a person who does have regular intimate sex with a partner but has such a high sex drive they still masturbate regardless? What if this person was a successful salesman, a husband and father, or any other host of successful positions in society? "Oh, he's secretly got a dark side, and he needs to eliminate it before it all comes crashing down." Doesn't this seem a little too... Hollywood?

The world is more complicated than these fad self-improvement movements let onto, and that causes a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time. "But you save time from not jacking off so much". Perhaps; but you waste time by being mentally frustrated, not getting the results you want, and not knowing what the fuck is going on. You also get absorbed into a hive-mind of rhetoric and group-think.

In fact, let's log onto the forum now and see what people are talking about. I'll paste verbatim some upvoted content, and you tell me whether or not this community makes sense for someone seeking results in life:

Topic: "Don't chase girls", 2nd highest upvoted on the forum. Don't a lot of guys get into No Fap because they think it will lead to better sexual relationships and experiences with girls?

Here's a top rated comment: "Yes this is true. I think a lot of people on NoFap are still putting girls on pedestals. Myself included! Chasing girls just for sex is going to bring you misery because you simply cant find happiness in that way. When you work out, or do nofap, or dress well, dont do it to get girls, do it for yourself. When you do this you find it doesn't bother you so much if you have a girl or not because you identity as a man is not dependent on that."

And here is why No Fap is a different kind of beast: there's actually some truth in here. Putting girls on a pedestal is a terrible idea, and one of the first things every guy needs to learn when he "unplugs" from mainstream social conditioning. But with the good comes the bad: sex is going to bring you misery? Let me tell you, having known quite a few virgin guys in my life, nothing brings a man more happiness than learning he can attract the opposite sex. Seeing the results of other facets of self-improvement (again, mentioned above) leading to actual results is one of the purest forms of confidence there is. And No Fap seeks to discredit this in some weird (il)logical dance to preserve the facetious "I'm doing this for me" mentality. Note that it's in their best interests to believe this; if they based their motivation on externalities like how women perceive them, they would constantly fail because quite frankly not fapping has little to do with how positively women view you.

Ironically enough, the best solution I've ever found to not fapping is to chase lots of girls and have an active sex life. You have to chase lots initially to filter out the ones with which you won't be compatible; plus your personality will be changing along the way. The symptom of excessive masturbation was cured - Praise Jesus! - when I started having regular sex in my early 20s. I was also able to concentrate better in all other aspects of my life once I was able to move up Maslow's Hierarchy.

This example of the 'No Fap movement' demonstrates one of the most important (and common) logical fallacies in self-improvement: confusing correlation with causation; or more specifically, reversing symptom and cause. "X is ruining my life, I need to stop X, then my life will be better". Many times, the right answer is closer to "I'm not happy with my life, I can't be, because if I was, I wouldn't be doing X so much."

Thanks to things like the 'self esteem movement' (are you seeing the pattern here? Most anything people call a "movement" is fucking stupid), people tend to avoid looking inwards. Do you know how hard it is for someone to admit that they're not happy with their life? It's unbelievable. They'd rather numb that thought with mindless entertainment. Yet it's the all-important step one to getting true results in anything - acknowledging reality.

If you've managed to read this far, I strongly recommend examining your vices, and think hard about whether it's a symptom or a cause. And if you really can identify the cause - lack of girls, shit job, whatever - start taking action to rectify it. I guarantee this will be more effective in the long run for living a more fulfilling life.