Day 1 you wrote down your guess for hours per week. Pull that number out.
Now do the math. Multiply by 52 weeks for a year. Then by however many years you've been doing this.
For many users in active recovery, the number lands somewhere between 1,500 and 8,000 hours of life. That's 60 to 330 days — months to nearly a year — of waking time, gone.
Industry-side, here's what those hours funded: — Pornhub's parent company has generated hundreds of millions in annual revenue at its peak. It was sold to a private buyer in 2023 for a price reported in the hundreds of millions. — A small group of obsessed users on OnlyFans has individually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the platform.
You were not "wasting time." You were transferring time, attention, and (often) money from your life into someone else's revenue line. They booked it as growth. You booked it as a problem you couldn't talk about.
This is not a guilt exercise. This is an accounting exercise. The hours have already been spent. The point of writing them down is not to make you feel worse — it's to make the trade visible. Most addictions stay addictive partly because the cost is invisible. Once you can see what you traded, you stop trading.
One more way to think about it: the industry's annual growth rate. Adult entertainment survived every recession of the past 25 years. Through COVID-19 lockdowns it grew sharply. Through Mindgeek's payment-processor scandals in 2020-2021 it kept operating. Nothing has stopped it. The only thing that ends it for you, personally, is leaving.
Multiply hours per week × 52 × years. The number is the cost. Industry growth means: nothing external is going to stop this. The trade ends when you leave it.
Write down what you would do with 1,000 free hours over the next 5 years. (1,000 hours = roughly 4 hours per week reclaimed.) Specific. Not 'travel more' — name the place. Not 'get fit' — name the goal.