In the course of my work on Plucky, I am witness to some trends among those who use it.

To oversimplify for the sake of this post, I’ll say that users tend to fall into one of these four buckets:

  1. Short-term users

  2. Easy-going users

  3. Long-term strugglers

  4. Long-term masochists

The short-term users are those who install Plucky for a short period of time, and then stop using it. Some of these may use Plucky to get through a tough time in school when they need to buckle down, and they are happy to go back to unrestricted Internet after their semester ends. Or they might only need to self-limit for a short period of time for some other reason. Some, perhaps, find that Plucky is a bad fit for them. And many, no doubt, like those who make resolutions at New Year’s, simply find that their initial commitment doesn’t stand the test of time, and the “new leaf” they intended to turn over doesn’t last long when the going gets tough. They give up quickly.

The easy-going users are those who use Plucky to good effect and who don’t really fight it. They are ripe for change, and in some mysterious recess of their souls, they want to live a more regulated life in which moderation is the rule rather than the exception. These people might not even enable the system feature that prevents several easy bypasses because after installing, they don’t try to get around Plucky. Presumably, they see the rules they configure with Plucky as a decision they’ve made, and having a great deal of integrity, they stick to this decision. I suspect some of these simply don’t use a computer for more than an hour a day. These users don’t get much upset, and they seem to have success because, like a raft flowing down a river, they sit back and easily drift with the Plucky current. It works for them. Some of them never even customize Plucky, they simply use a prepackaged Plucky configuration, perhaps with no images. And they do so for a long time, I hope to good effect in their lives.

The long-term strugglers are those who have a more intense compulsion than the easy-goers, and this compulsion is usually to porn, gaming, or gambling. Having some level of self-discipline, these users might enjoy longer periods of success, or “clean streaks”. Some continue a very long time and seem to have achieved practical sobriety against their former vices. Many, however, slip up every few weeks or months, but continue to struggle on, not uninstalling Plucky, and probably resolving time and again to live differently. Some stay in this state, back and forth, for years. A few end up “giving the keys” to their computer to their spouse or friends and make their device restricted because they have found that the self-control approach was more than they could handle.

The long-term masochists are those who seem to have a very intense compulsion, and who, God bless them, are trying really hard to change their behavior. No doubt, they make ardent resolutions, but they have a dark side that refuses to change. These folk typically try very hard to get around Plucky and do rather unusual things on occasion to circumvent Plucky. These folk will confess to using their mom’s smart phone to get porn when no other option is available. These folk will report doing things that clearly required hours of “attacking” their Plucky configuration in order to get around it before their very long delay expires. These folk may request Plucky block images of literal stick figures because the stick figures are drawn in sexual positions. These folk will erect huge barriers to porn because they know they will also attempt to break down these walls later, and any wall that is too low will be “useless”. Like the long-term strugglers, quite a few of them use Plucky for years. But when one interacts with the long-term masochist, unlike the struggler, one can sense the veritable raging demons that must be inside given the content of their intermittent pleas for help that trickle through the Plucky support systems.

While I do want to help these people, I have come to the conclusion that some of those in buckets 3 or 4 are not helped when I repeatedly give them technical solutions, over and over, in their fight. Too many of them need to address the human side, but are completely neglecting that. For example, consider this quote (grammar corrected) from a user in the Plucky forum:

… Surely a strict config that can block p… (or anything bad) would make a recovery program unnecessary?

If Plucky is all you need, that’s great. That might be true of some people – more distance from tempting material may be all that some need to live better.

But for many, that which drives the compulsion is more than mere software can address. Humans are incredibly complicated creatures.

Many people who try to use Plucky to quit porn are unsuccessful precisely because they think that simply blocking their access to porn will solve their “problems”. They focus on the behavior or the environment while neglecting to look at their soul, which is the ultimate driver of appetite and compulsion in the first place.

Plucky is merely a tool to alter the playing field with respect to the Internet, to give people more distance from addictive and harmful material. But it does not address the whole person. I think a great number of Plucky users would do well to use more tools in their effort to live well, especially ones that address the human such as recovery programs.

In light of this, I have recently decided that although I believe my primary role is to provide a technical solution, I will no longer provide infinite technical support to long-term strugglers or long-term masochists who are not engaged in any real soul work because I believe that “helping” these people with Plucky rules or tools isn’t real help.

If you have been using Plucky more than a year, and you are still actively, frequently attacking it, I will not provide a technical fix for you unless you can confirm you are involved in some organization, community (NoFap does not count as a community), course, program, counseling, or other resource that is attended to address the root cause: your heart. Otherwise, it feels like I’m just continually selling you Oreos when what you need is real food and real drink.

Plucky can give you space and some extra strength. But you must work on your soul.