Gaming for Mental Health

You know the feeling. You pick up your phone to check one notification, and the next thing you know, an hour has vanished. Your thumb has been scrolling, your brain has been absorbing, but you could not tell me a single thing you actually did. You feel hollow. Anxious. Maybe a little bit ashamed. That is doomscrolling, and almost everyone has been there. But there is another loop, darker and less talked about, that runs on the exact same engine. It is called gooning. The name sounds like a joke, a meme, something that belongs in the corners of the internet where people collect obscure slang. But gooning is not a joke. It is the sexual twin of doomscrolling—same architecture, same damage, same invisible cage. Understanding how they mirror each other might finally help you break free from both. So what is gooning, really? The term refers to prolonged, trance-like masturbation where the explicit goal is not climax. A person in a gooning session stays in a state of high arousal for hours, ...

Last Christmas, a colleague—someone deeply immersed in the world of natural therapy—gave me a Schumann resonance machine. For those unfamiliar, the device emits a 7.83 Hz electromagnetic frequency, supposedly mimicking the Earth's natural "heartbeat" in claims that trace back to physicist Winfried Otto Schumann and his 1952 resonance hypothesis. There is little rigorous science backing its therapeutic promises. The research is thin, the mechanisms speculative at best. But I trusted her. And because of that trust, I gave it a try. I set the machine to play a 7 Hz wave during my sleep routine, tucked it beneath my pillow, and forgot about it—not out of skepticism, but out of routine. Weeks passed. Then months. And somewhere in that quiet span, I noticed something unexpected: my insomnia, a stubborn companion I had learned to tolerate, had softened. I was falling asleep faster. Staying asleep longer. Waking less often in the gray hours before dawn, my mind already racing. Do...

In our last exploration, I introduced you to the herbivore man—the gentle soul who stopped hunting, who traded the exhausting chase for the quiet peace of self-cultivation. But every revolution has its counterpoint. For every man who stepped back from the traditional script of aggressive pursuit, a new figure emerged on the horizon: the carnivore woman. She is the woman who decided that waiting was no longer an option. She is the one who approaches first, who initiates the conversation, who asks for the number, who makes the plan. She is, in the most literal sense of the metaphor, the hunter in a world where the prey has grown shy. This is not a story about diet. This is a story about agency, about the slow unraveling of centuries-old scripts, and about the strange, unexpected dance between those who no longer chase and those who finally decided to. --- Part I: Who Is the Carnivore Woman? The term carnivore woman— nikushoku-kei joshi in Japanese—emerged as the natural counterpart to th...