Doing something is better than doing nothing for most people: study (2014)

As for programming, I'd suggest building a few programs by following some tutorials on YouTube. In particular, programs that automate your browser or computer can be really satisfying: "open this page/program, click here, take a screenshot of this area." There should be plenty of tutorials out there that will do a basic setup for those. And if you know any programmers, ask them to help you get started. Almost without fail, I've found the hardest part of programming tutorials is installing things before you start coding. Followed closely by tutorials being out of date. So expect to try a few that don't work before you find a good one. Language does and doesn't matter: again, ask any programmers you know what they'd suggest if you only learned one language (I'd say JS).

Good luck! It's fun building castles in the air. https://commandlinezen.com/explaining-the-joy-of-programming...

Now bring in the porn websites and you will realise how it programs the user's mind in a similar way. Eg. After some time, some people will exhibit cuckold, submission/domination, incest behaviour in real life. Some will look at an older woman and not see a mother but a milf. Hope you get the point. I don't have any scientific proof but I used to be a porn user myself. You are welcome to research the subject further if you are interested.

Referring back to the parent comment, as the stimulation of vanilla porn becomes boring, the user will need to watch more and more hyper stimulating material. Not dissimilar from a drug user. Some lose the interest in regular real life sex altogether or need to incorporate their porn habits into it.

I don't mean to generalize so if you don't think it applies to you then move on, but if you are interested in self improvement then tread these waters carefully.

In one book I read about childhood trauma, it related an experiment they did where they put two rats in side-by-side cages, but they couldn't see each other. One rat had a lever; when they pushed the lever, both rats would get an electric shock, and both rats would receive a pellet of food. The rat with the lever quickly figured out the deal: Whenever I push the lever, I get shocked, but I get food: painful, but predictable and under its control. It adapted to the situation completely fine.

The other rat's physical sensations were exactly the same: it was shocked at exactly the same painfulness and degree as the rat with the lever, and received the same amount of food. But its psychological sensations were very different: It had no control over when the shocks would happen, nor any way to predict them. It basically withdrew and became a nervous wreck.

The point was: We can actually endure an awful lot of suffering if we can predict when it's going to happen, and particularly if we have some control over when it happens.

The author described the experiment to explain the behavior of one of the children in the book. A girl's mother started dating a man who began, occasionally, to get very drunk and then sexually molest the girl; after which he would be very apologetic and remoreseful, until the next time he got drunk. In response, the girl started getting the boyfriend drunk on purpose. The idea (surmised the psychologist author) was: I can't stop it from happening, but at least this way I can control when it happens, which makes it much more tolerable.

If they'd given people the option to either sit in a chair and be randomly shocked without warning, or to stand, I'm willing to bet that far fewer of the men would have sat in the chair.