Here’s another real-life example of how an online pornography addiction can permanently ruin your life. You might remember hearing about the following incident in September 2010: An employee for the local blood bank was preparing to give a presentation to 400 high school students in the PA high school’s auditorium about giving blood. Somehow, during the setup, pornographic images were displayed onto the screen, and it made national news. How did it happen?
Well, how it happened is important, because it shows that even when you store images or videos on a thumb drive, you can still run into trouble. The blood bank employee had set up his computer and hooked it up to the overhead projector for the entire auditorium to see. While he was doing something else, the assistant principle, for whatever reason, decided to insert the blood bank employee’s thumb drive into the computer and start clicking on things. Up come pornographic images to the amusement of the students and horror of administrators. The police are called in, the parents are up in arms, and the employee gets put on suspension. Something that took 15 seconds to happen has ruined this blood bank employee’s life, if not forever, then for a very long time.
Things don’t usually start off with you carrying around pornographic images on a thumb drive. At first, you probably viewed pornography on a select personal computer, and then got more comfortable with it. Maybe you burned some CDs and carted those around with you, or just put stuff on the thumb thinking you wouldn’t get caught because the images and videos were not on your work hard drive. But as we see with this example, things can change in a hurry. And it’s the things you don’t expect that you need to understand are the things that will derail you. Someone else picking up your thumb drive. A stolen backpack with your computer and drives/CDs in it. A co-worker grabbing something out of your bad for you and coming out with the wrong thing. Or even you making a mistake and sticking the wrong drive or CD into your machine, perhaps in a pressure situation where you’re not thinking clearly or are in a hurry.
The blood bank guy thought he was just going to work and then going about his business. He ends up making national news and perhaps losing his job. And he won’t be getting a new job anytime soon. Is the solution to be more careful with pornographic images? Probably not. The answer is to reduce or eliminate your dependence on the pornography in the first place. If you’re carting this stuff around with you at work, then you’ve become extremely dependent on the false self-esteem boost one gets when they view pornography. It’s short-lived, full of guilt, and while you get a short term ego boost, the overall trend is that of masturbation eroding your self esteem.
The idea is to slowly, over time, lower your dependence on pornographic media. And the way to do that is to slowly build your self-esteem while you decrease your time digging up and accessing pornographic media on the computer. Sounds easy, but it’s a lot like quitting smoking. Cold turkey is likely to fail. What’s more often successful is a slow and steady approach where you systematically change your behavior over time. This is easier said than done, but with a solid plan and some guidelines, you can make the switch and change the course of your life. The beauty of it is that you can do it without a whole lot of pain, while you build your self-esteem up and minimize your pornography addiction.
This is why we need to control the drives that push us to pornography, and redirect them to help us minimize our susceptibility to pornography. In the end, controlling this urge will make us stronger, and our world better.