This post was originally shared in March, 2018. 3-minute read.
Before the internet, it used to be pretty stereotypical for a guy to have a stash of Playboy magazines stuffed under their mattress, or a few explicit posters hanging around their dorm room.
Now, with the boom of internet porn, many of today’s porn consumers store digital files of their favorite performers and clips on their computers. And while it’s common to have a large collection of hardcore, explicit content downloaded and saved, it’s not often that you’ll find someone with 1 terabyte of the stuff saved, let alone 18 terabytes.
Recently on the NoFap Reddit forum, a man revealed how he accumulated 18 terabytes of porn and took the bold step of deleting it all to help him overcome his toxic habit.
Related: Why So Many Young Men Are Ditching Porn For Good
In a post titled, “Deleted 18 terabytes of porn today because i realized what it was doing to me and my GF,” he explained how porn was hurting his relationship and negatively affecting the way he looked at other people. And even though he had all those terabytes at his fingertips, “I probably only saw about 2% of that, but I kept going down that rabbit hole,” he said.
That’s a lot of porn
To put the size of his collection into perspective, a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, so the man’s 18 terabyte collection is equivalent to 5,400 hours of high-quality video or 64.8 million images. At a rate of watching eight hours of video per day, it would have taken him 20 months of daily consumption to get through his entire collection just once, reported The Independent.
“I would get a rush downloading all that I could, spending days at a time just downloading video after video, even creating lightweight PHP bots to do it for me the more I did it,” the man wrote on the forum dedicated to people unhooking themselves from their porn obsessions.
However, he explained that despite being fit, he lost his erection when having sex with his girlfriend multiple times.
Related: See Exactly How Many People Are Watching Porn Today (Hint: It’s A Lot)
“It’s definitely the porn, I know it is,” he wrote. “I don’t even look at regular women the same.”
The man admitted that he’d spent five years amassing his porn collection but decided to make the move in a bid to combat his “performance anxiety.”
The decision to delete
“I know it’s a lot, but the addiction was too real. Just wanted to get it off my chest… Thanks y’all for the support,” the original poster said.
“18 terabytes of poison,” one supporter commented in the forum. “18 terabytes of lying to yourself, eluding yourself, and deceiving your own brain. 18 terabytes of social awkwardness, lack of confidence, and fear in your heart. 18 terabytes of fake, digital relationships with paid actors on screen. 18 terabytes of wiring your brain into a dopamine-overloaded junkyard. Mark this day, because the day you got rid of this poison is the next day of the rest of your life. The ‘better part.’ Not gonna be easy, not gonna be pleasant, not gonna be quick. But it’s sure as hell gonna be worth it.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We applaud this guy’s decision to ditch porn for good!
Why this matters
The reality is, porn isn’t just a casual pastime with zero harms attached. It’s not harmless personal entertainment, and it isn’t nontoxic for the consumer.
Porn’s harmful effects don’t stop once the browser window is closed—it’s not an “on” and “off” switch that the consumer can use to decide whether they want porn to affect them or not. Being that deep into porn, and having that developed of an interest and obsession with it, is a lifestyle.
Related: I Stopped Watching Porn And Here’s Why I’m Never Going Back
The more research is done on porn’s effects, the more society sees how much it can change and rewire the consumer’s brain. It can alter the way they see other people through repeated objectification, and it can change the way they even see their partner. For many consumers, porn can downgrade the way they view themselves and damage their self-esteem.
Like many former consumers will tell you, stopping their porn habit was the first step in improving their life dramatically, and that goes for personalized relationships as well as their relationship with themselves.
No matter what the porn industry wants you to think, it isn’t natural, or healthy. Science and research are continuing to show just how much porn can harm the consumer and their relationships. And in the end, it’s not worth it. Join us in fighting for healthy relationships, and ditching porn for good.
