Need support. I am feeling doomed.

I am a 26 year old American. I started ejaculating since I was 14 years old. From that point onward I would technically spend the next 12 years ejaculating. I always masturbated to women's wrestling but not really pornography. It was only around 2016 (So I was around 23 years old) when I discovered NoFap.com, and I started to view pornography less, and ejaculate less. But I never really succeeded in quitting. Now, I know that was the end goal all along. I never really tried as hard as I could to quit PMO. So from year 2016-2020 I would spend those four years putting in low effort to try to quit PMO.

For the entirety of human history men have not had access to such easily delivered pornography, in addition to the fact that the way society was structured, people really didn't have this much alone time. People's lives revolved ENTIRELY around each other. In fact, that's ALL THERE WAS TO DO.

There was not an insidious system of media and internet to corrupt and put everyone in a wooden box watching a screen. And in fact that was probably better for society anyway, because it made everyone actually have to try to behave in a way that everyone else tolerated. Everyone HAD to get along, because there was nothing else to do except work or farm.

Now we have this culture of "go to work then come home be antisocial, **** other people and **** having to put effort into getting along with other people I'll just watch netflix and eat icecream". And no, COVID had nothing much to do with this. It's been like this since around 2010. Hyper-internetization, hyper technologization. In fact due to the internet and social media the common decency towards strangers and people you don't know is non-existent. We're not all in this together, and people are far more encouraged to be inclusive and closed off in the few cliques that exist nowadays.

So on that matter, men ejaculated and masturbated far, far less. Each society/community/culture in each country was more closely tied to a religion, which provided discipline to individuals and made things like masturbation very forbidden and very taboo. Also there just wasn't anything to jack off to, men just weren't jacking off. Prostitution was probably more common than masturbation.

So it is instinctual to NOT masturbate. A popular piece of information that floats around in NoFap communities is the fact that there really are no other mammals in the animal kingdom that ejaculate just to ejaculate. Nope, that is exclusively human. There is literally no other animal that ejaculates as much as homo sapiens. We are worse off than dogs or monkeys. Furthermore, it's something like 30% of men do not have a chronic masturbation addiction. 70% rest have some PMO addiction. And guess what? It's all those guys that have girlfriends and nice jobs. Not a coincidence. Furthermore, men coming from middle class families have it ingrained that this is how success occurs; a clean healthy individual free from addiction, retaining all of his semen. They actually don't and never masturbate, or ejaculate.

So, there are men who went through their whole teenage years, their whole adult years, without viewing pornography or ejaculating AT ALL.

And then there's me, my soul destroyed from 12 years of smoking weed and ejaculating. If someone was actually there to tell me the effects of addiction, and stop me, or if I just never actually got PMO or weed addiction I would be a completely different person.

That was 12 years of semen that I needed to become the man I was supposed to be, the man I would have become if I retained for 12 years. Now, I will never be who I was supposed to be. It's like even if I can abstain from this point onward as my 26 year old self it's just damage control. I am so far behind.

I definitely don't smoke weed anymore either because I need all the sharpness I can get. I still believe that success is possible since I'm deciding to retain and I'm confident I will be retaining for the rest of my life. I can find myself in a career or job that pays well enough, that is not impossible especially in America.

I feel doomed. I feel behind.