The Gooner's Guide to Life: A Field Manual for Men Who Have Spent Too Long in the Tabs

You opened one tab. Then another. Then another.

At some point, the tabs stopped being something you used and started being somewhere you lived.

The Gooner's Guide to Life is a funny, blunt, surprisingly practical field manual for men who have spent too much time in the browser—and are starting to wonder what all those hours have actually cost them.

This isn't a sermon. It isn't a medical textbook. And it definitely isn't a guide to pornography. There is no explicit content here.

Instead, Benedict Urlaub takes a long, hard, frequently hilarious look at the culture of "gooning": the marathon sessions, the endless scrolling, the specialized vocabulary, the memes, the shame, the promises made at 3 a.m., and the strange way an internet habit can quietly consume time, sleep, money, relationships, motivation, and real life.

Then the book changes direction.

What happens when you're ready to close the tabs?

Inside, you'll find:

• A field guide to gooner culture and its strange vocabulary
• An honest look at compulsive behavior, infinite scrolling, and the pursuit of novelty
• A look at how porn can influence expectations about sex, intimacy, and relationships—without pretending the science is simpler than it is
• Practical exercises for figuring out exactly what your habit is costing you
• Three different approaches to changing the behavior, from quitting entirely to setting limits
• A 30-day plan for getting out of the loop
• Strategies for handling urges, triggers, late nights, and relapse
• Advice for rebuilding your social life and remembering how to talk to actual humans again
• A plan for figuring out what to do with all those hours once you get them back
• A 30-day tracker, urge playbook, and resource guide

Most importantly, this book doesn't treat you like a monster.

It treats you like a person who developed a habit, discovered that the habit had gotten bigger than intended, and decided it might be time to do something about it.

If you've ever looked at the clock and wondered where four hours went, promised yourself "never again" at 3 a.m., or realized that your laptop has become more familiar than the world outside your room, you're not the first person to end up here.

You can close a tab.

You can close another one.

And eventually, you can go outside.

Welcome to the program, recruit.