I have been at this for twenty or thirty years. Is it too late, and is it different for me?

The question has two halves, and they are in completely different states of evidence.

Is it different after decades? Unmeasured. The best-controlled trial in this space — a randomised study of twelve sessions of acceptance and commitment therapy — reported a 93% reduction in viewing against 21% in a waitlist group, with 54% ceasing entirely at the end of treatment and 35% still at zero three months later. It ran on 28 adult men, almost all from a single religious community, and it does not report how long any of them had been using. The broader meta-analytic picture supports CBT and ACT for problematic use and for the depressive symptoms that travel with it, with a high risk of bias and small samples throughout. What none of it contains is a duration variable. Anyone telling you that thirty years means something specific is extrapolating from nothing.

The frame underneath the question is also less settled than it sounds. Whether compulsive pornography use is best modelled as an addiction is genuinely unresolved among researchers, and "too late" borrows most of its weight from the addiction model, where a long history is taken to mean deeper damage. You may be applying the conclusion of an argument that has not finished.

Is it too late? This half does have evidence, and it is not about pornography. Marlatt's relapse-prevention model identifies the Abstinence Violation Effect: after a lapse, attributing it to a permanent personal flaw predicts a full return to the behaviour. "I am too far gone" and "this is just who I am now" are that attribution in its most durable form — not a verdict on one evening but a standing one, issued in advance, available to explain away anything that happens next. It is a belief rather than a measurement, which is exactly why it is the part you can work on.

What twenty years does change

Some things, honestly, and they are practical rather than biological.

• More context. A behaviour repeated in stable surroundings for decades has more cues attached to it: more rooms, more hours, more moods that have been paired with it. That is a bigger mapping job, not a different one.
• More identity. Self-description travels with habit — people describe long-held behaviours as part of who they are — though which one pulls the other has not been established, so this is a hedge and not a mechanism. Still, a habit you have been narrating about yourself for thirty years is defended by more than the habit.
• More failed attempts to argue with. Decades of trying produce decades of breaches, and every one of them is available to be cited against you by the effect above. That is the real weight of a long history, and it is made of interpretation rather than tissue.

None of that is a measurement of difficulty. It is a description of what has accumulated, and all three are things you can work on directly.

Be suspicious of confidence in either direction. "It is never too late" is a slogan rather than a finding, and "your brain has been rewired for thirty years" is worse than a slogan — it is a mechanism claim with no evidence behind it, delivered to somebody with every reason to believe it.

What is left is what anyone gets: choose the goal deliberately instead of inheriting it, map the contexts one at a time, and treat the next slip as information rather than as confirmation of something you already suspected about yourself. That last one is worth more after thirty years than after two, precisely because you have so much more to argue with.

Where this comes from

Read the full lesson: From resisting to being someone →