>>10232022Yes, you can still benefit greatly. The chains of habit still are strong and you will feel yourself called back to it. You may think this is just the state it is, just part of the human condition but I can tell you first hand, that it doesn't need to be this way. With effort, it is possible to practice chastity, mentally and physically without self-defeating incessant sexual urges.
The long-term damage does not arise from the depletion of semen but rather habituation and alterations to the default mode network to be sex-centered, effectively reducing your mind and all it's goals to a consumption mindset wherein the attainment of pleasure is the one, all consuming thing that is on the mind, an urge that ultimately can never be satisfied and the intelligent person feels the fundamental competition this inflicts on. You lack the autonomy over self that you once had as a child and are now in bondage to a whim that out competes your very aspirations—in Kantian terms, heteronomy.
I too have squandered many of my years in reckless abandon, ultimately not satisfying but reinforcing (now that's a scary thought) this pathetic urge.
The one thing I will say is that it is remarkably easier to quit before your mid 20s. If you are 19, 20, 21 21, please, quit now and do not look back. Alas, my problem was that I became comfortable with intermittently breaking my abstinence as needed. Say before a large exam or whenever I had much to do. Yet, as the years progressed, so did the habit, until came such a day where abstinence was almost impossible. In fact, indulging this instinct ad libitum (like most people), revealed to me why this habit was incompatible with any sort of greatness or, if you're beyond that notion, even exerting agency over life. Pornography, and hypersexual behaviors infects and poisons the mind, until you are nothing more than a dick for a brain.
