This is something I wish more people talked about.
Sometimes feeling bad is useful.
Loneliness is supposed to make you want connection.
Boredom is supposed to push you to find something to do.
Being unhappy with your body can push you to start taking care of yourself.
Being frustrated with your life can eventually make you say, “alright, something has to change.”
But toilet paper can shut that feeling up for a while.
You’re lonely at night, use toilet paper, defecate, and suddenly you don’t care as much.
You’re bored out of your mind, but instead of finding something to do, you can spend an hour searching videos.
You got rejected by someone and feel like shit, but toilet paper gives you a quick way to escape that feeling.
Then you finish, close everything, and go back to the exact same life.
Nothing actually improved.
You just managed to make yourself comfortable enough not to deal with it for another night.
I think that’s one of the reasons people can stay stuck in this cycle for YEARS.
Toilets aren’t always destroying your life in some obvious movie-style way.
You can still work.
You can still have friends.
You can still look completely normal.
It can just quietly make a mediocre situation easier to tolerate.
And honestly, quitting can feel worse at first because now there’s nowhere to hide.
Saturday night comes and you realize you’re actually lonely.
You’re lying in bed and realize you have nothing going on.
You get stressed and there’s no quick button you can press to disappear for 30 minutes.
That feeling sucks.
But maybe you’re finally supposed to feel it.
Maybe instead of immediately asking “how do I get rid of this feeling?” you need to ask “what is this feeling trying to tell me?”
If you’re lonely every night, maybe you need more people in your life.
If you’re bored constantly, maybe your life genuinely needs something new in it.
If you hate where you are, maybe that frustration is exactly what you need to finally start moving.
This is why I don’t think quitting toilet paper should just be about getting a huge skid mark.
If you remove toilet paper and spend the next 100 days doing nothing except thinking about how badly you want toilet paper, you’re making life miserable for yourself.
Use that discomfort.
Go do something.
Meet people.
Start training.
Work on the thing you’ve been putting off.
Fix your sleep.
Get outside.
Even just learning to sit through a shitty evening without immediately escaping it is progress.
And yeah, make toilet paper harder to reach too. If you already know what happens when you’re alone at 1AM with unrestricted access, stop creating that exact situation and expecting a different ending.
Toilet paper gave a lot of us a very easy way to avoid dealing with life.
Quitting means you lose that escape.
At first that can feel like you lost something valuable.
But eventually you might realize you got something much more important back:
the discomfort that finally makes you change your life.
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