Title. I hate to admit it but I'm an addict and the cycle of getting off to porn has made me seek out harder fetishes I'm not comfortable with in person. So I'm looking to quit. Not do no-fap mind you since that's nonsense, I just don't want to have porn in my life anymore and try and get back to who I used to be.
Any input is more than welcome!
I don't know if I was ever addicted to porn, but I went from consuming porn to not at all mostly because I felt like porn consumption was a massive time sink that was not worth it. I have shit to do, and I no longer have the time to waste an entire Saturday morning getting off.
You pretty much have to learn how to masturbate without porn. If you're one of those people who need porn in order to get off, you'll never be able to cut out porn from your life because cutting out porn is tantamount to cutting out masturbation, and we all know how well abstinence works.
So step 1 is just learning how to masturbate without porn. You can use anything else (ie sex toys), but you can't use porn. It might be a completely mechanical and thoroughly awkward experience the first time you do it, but at the end of the day, sex is a skill like any other and sex with yourself is no exception. The point of masturbation without porn is to decouple masturbation from porn. How you see masturbation is up to you. Whether you see it as you sensually exploring yourself or you just clearing your pipes like a plumber (assuming you have a penis), the point is that the decoupling has to happen.
Once you're able to masturbate without porn and enjoy it, step 2 is to quit cold turkey by replacing porn with masturbation. Yes, this sounds very silly to say and silly to type, but if you've properly decouple porn from masturbation, it's not so silly. "I am addicted to X, so whenever I have an urge to do X, I do Y instead" is a perfectly normal statement, so why can't you choose to masturbate if you feel an urge to watch porn? When I had that realization for the first time, I remember mentally short-circuiting, but it's precisely this mental rewiring that's needed in order to get you out of your addiction hole. Instead of going, "I feel like getting off, so I'll start by consuming porn," it's "I feel like consuming porn, so I'll combat this urge by getting off instead." You're flipping the entire script on its head.
The only caution is that I don't know how bad your porn addiction is and whether my steps will backfire by turning you from a porn addict into a chronic masturbater. But it worked for me, so maybe you can adapt some of what I used to make it work for you.