The barber who explained addiction better than any book I read

I had been addicted to porn since my early teens. By 2021 I was in my mid twenties, which meant I had spent half of my life using it. I had read the books. I understood the neuroscience. I could have given you a competent explanation of why I should stop, and I had been giving myself that explanation for over a decade.

None of it worked. The thing that finally did came from a barbershop in São Paulo, and it took about two minutes to explain.

Tom

My barber's name is Tom. 50-year-old divorced guy with a couple of children back then. He cuts hair amazingly well, but he also teaches social sciences at a high school, which means a haircut with him is rarely just a haircut.

That day he was thinking out loud about something he had noticed: how many people he knew had beaten serious drug addiction through churches. Not treatment centres, not therapy, not willpower. Churches.

He was not being pious about it. Although I want to be careful here, because people's faith deserves respect and this is not an argument about religion. He was looking at it as a social scientist. His question was mechanical: what is it about that particular setting that works, when so much else fails?

His answer had nothing to do with belief.

The tithes and offerings

Tom's theory was this.

When someone in Brazil gets deep enough into addiction, the family often turns to the church. And at some point, the family gives something of monetary value like tithes and offerings. It can be something small, but it can also be something meaningful, like a car. And once that car is gone, he said, the man had better get himself together. Because otherwise his family lost a car for nothing.

That was it. That was the whole theory.

I nodded at the time and didn't say much else. Then I thought about it on the walk home, and on and off for the next several years.

Why it stuck

Because it explained my entire failure back to me in one image.

Everything I had ever tried to quit was built on a promise I made to myself. Install the blocker. Start the streak. Tell myself tomorrow is different. And every one of those promises had exactly one thing in common: breaking it cost me nothing that I could feel that night.

I had gone to great extents to try to quit and make it hard to fail. I would set up Apple Screen Time restrictions on my iPhone and hide the password in a park a few blocks away, or tell someone to keep the password from me without telling them the reason. I would pair that with having Cold Turkey installed on my desktop computer.

That sounded like I plan, until I learned I could uninstall Cold Turkey in 1 minute if I wanted to with a brute force uninstaller, or simply visit a porn website through a proxy. During the urges, I also learnt that Screen Time filters didn't work for 3rd party browsers (and there are so many to install). I was back to square one, completely vulnerable to the next big urge and eventually counting on willpower alone.

The damage from porn is real, but it arrives as a slow tax over years. It erodes your attention, your relationships, how you feel about yourself when you close the laptop. None of that shows up at 1am before the sexual release. At 1am there is only the urge, which is immediate and physical, versus a vague future benefit, which is neither.

That is not a fair fight, and no amount of wanting it badly enough makes it one.

What the donated car does is drag the cost forward. It takes something that would have been a diffuse, deniable, faraway consequence and makes it a concrete thing that already happened, sitting in the driveway where the car used to be. The man is no longer negotiating with his future self. He is negotiating with his family's loss, today.

That is not faith. That is a mechanism. Behavioural economists have a name for it: a commitment device. And the underlying finding is one of the most replicated in the field: people fight roughly twice as hard to avoid losing something as they do to gain the same thing.

Tom got there before I did, and he got there while cutting hair.

What I did with it

For years I filed it away as an interesting idea that I could work on someday to get over my own addictions. I had not started working on it until 2025, though, since I knew a solution like that applied to internet usage would need to be multi-platform to work properly, and that would require substantial efforts and knowledge of the different operating systems.

So after 1 year of work, I had finally built a version of Tom's idea I could make work for myself: put real money behind a commitment, have something watch whether I kept it, and lose the money if I did not. Not a bigger consequence. An immediate one.

I finally felt free from an addiction that had been haunting me for over 15 years. An addiction that had eroded many aspects of my life, my own self-esteem and wellbeing. I have been using it successfully since May 2026 and iterated it to optimize my own usage and user experience.

That became Staked. It is Tom's theory with a payment processor attached.

The part I keep coming back to

The reason I tell this story is not the tithes, offerings or churches. It is that a barber in São Paulo diagnosed, in a passing remark, something that every product I had tried had missed entirely.

They were all built on the assumption that I would be as motivated at 1am not to cheat as I was at the moment I installed them. Tom's version assumes the opposite — that the person will not be strong enough, and arranges the world in advance so that it does not depend on him being strong enough or following the blocker's intended usage.

That is the only approach that has ever worked for me. I wrote more about why the conventional tools fail in Why regular porn blockers are useless.

Tom, if you ever read this: you were right, and I owe you more than the tip. I owe getting my life back to you.