Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) – An app to help cut down on compulsive porn usage

You shouldn't be posting mean and snarky one-liners to HN, let alone shallow dismissals of someone's work. All that is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Even so I have some sympathy with the point behind your point and it makes me want to write something.

It's true that our society has commodified and mechanized a lot of what used to be, and arguably should still be, human relations. But we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the better. Your comment reminds me of a Launch HN from last week of a startup that provides advances to blue-collar workers on their wages (in a better way than payday loans). They had a story of some guy who ran out of gas, signed up for their app from the side of a highway, and got enough money to get gas and keep going. My first thought was: people shouldn't be paid so little that that can happen to them in the first place. On the other hand, those economics aren't going away soon, and it was much better for that man that the app existed, instead of staying stranded on the side of the road.

In that case the active ingredient (the drug, one might say) was money and in this case it's sex, but either way, the startup is (presumably) doing some good, even if the broader context isn't changing much. I'm sure a lot of us feel queasy about the mixture of for-profit companies and helping people—but this is the nature of the web of economic and social relations in which we're all embedded. Non-profits have their own problems and it's certainly not the case that they are somehow immune from that web or pure of it. Quite the opposite.

One other thing: to say we're all embedded means we're all embedded. That includes you; I mean, you're expressing your desire for supportive relations to be free of profit motives on a forum operated by a company with profit motives—not only that, the very company that funded just the startup you're dissing, and why? Profit motive. I think it's important for people who care about human relations not to take the stone-casting attitude of pretending to be pure and denouncing others, as if they/we weren't also implicated in the system that has these properties. To pretend otherwise is self-deceptive and for my money that can only add problem, not solution.

If we can't allow profit motives to be mixed with nobler motives and call that a relatively good thing, the endgame of that stance is to leave nothing but profit motives. Of the available options, I think we should take the impure mixed bag.

This is a sci fi thing (literally black mirror) but one day when we have AR contacts, I would like to see what life would be like if I replaced women to look plain to me, like how I would be disinterested in men personally. Then I can live my life not being distracted, like in a work place, they'd just be another person I work with, no urges. I know I'm a creep for thinking that way.

The other part of me that thinks this it's like giving up. I think to truly not care you need true abundance (action).

Also extremes like pre-scanning incoming images on social media for semi-mature content and then blocking it, I do see that aspect.

It is a thing though "simping" i.e. OF or Hololive on YT(this is less sexual more on the social replacement aspect), etc... getting sucked into that... thankfully I have not personally done that. But I am still a lonely man that is true. Couple minutes of the pixel release and I'm on my way.

Off the top of my head no, most of my insight came from observing addiction in others, and experimenting over the course of a decade. However, the two books which I guess started me on this journey are Why We Get Fat by Garry Taube [0] and The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris [1]. Both of these books take a scientific approach to diet (which is governed by habit and addiction, after all).

I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions, all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad.

For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist. And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK.

If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee, pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold turkey quitting any chemical, at least not before seeing a doctor. Chemical withdrawals range from terrible headaches for coffee, to deadly DTs from alcohol.

[0] http://garytaubes.com/works/books/why-we-get-fat

[1] https://fourhourbody.com

I can appreciate that you have a different view from mine, but I am feeling like you didn't quite understand what I wrote. That's okay. Your judgement is totally valid, and I hope that as your view evolves, you continue to publish it.