241. The Porn Addict Who Became a Monk

Why does a man with everything going right for him quietly fall apart on the inside? Jeremy Lipkowitz was a PhD student at Duke studying the genetic code that supposedly explains what a human being is. On the outside it looked like a life going exactly to plan. In private he was losing to a compulsion nobody around him knew about, and the more he achieved the worse it got. Eventually he stopped trying to fix himself from the outside, left the program, flew to Myanmar, and ordained as a monk. He has spent the last decade teaching men to do what he did, without religion, dogma, or drugs. His show is Unhooked and his work is at https://unhookedacademy.com/ We talk about where shame actually comes from, what happens to you around day four of a silent retreat, and whether moderation is possible with anything engineered to hook you. Late in the episode we get into whether there is anything behind all of this. He says no. I made my case anyway. Neither of us moved, and that exchange might be my favorite part of the conversation.