“I am 22 and unemployed,” one person writes on the question-and-answer website Quora. “I am wasting [my] entire day watching porn and browsing Facebook. What should I do in my free time which is more productive?” The answers from well-meaning strangers are telling. Do a course, join the military, or learn to code so you can create fun apps for all the other bored 20-somethings out there who are watching porn all day. “Or try going outside,” jokes another. “I heard there’s stuff to do out there. Supposedly, there are people and places outside that you can interact with.”
Such complaints are growing increasingly common.
But addiction is powerful – a Cambridge University study found in 2014 that porn triggers brain activity in sex addicts in the same way that drugs trigger drug addicts. The research also found that the younger the user, the greater the neural response to porn.
