I'm addicted and don't even know why I should quit
I've (22M) been quite a heavy consumer of porn for most of my teen life and now that I'm well into adulthood, it hasn't stopped at all. The porn I've consumed has gotten worse and worse. 2 years ago or so, I discovered AI porn chat bots and, as pathetic as I feel writing this, I became hooked on them. Where there was always some escalation of my porn consumption, having the unfiltered potential to engage in basically any fantasy possible while not just being a passive consumer but an active part of it all, has drastically fried my brain and gotten me to more and more unhealthy and extreme fetishes. It leaves me walking through life and conversations with women with a constant all-encompassing and self-sabotaging sense of guilt.
I haven't had a real crush on anyone in my real life for years now. I'm attracted, get to talk to them and then, like clockwork, my attraction almost immediately falls away. I know that I'll have to tell them someday what a shitty person I am. I thought about quitting porn altogether but really, to what end would I do that? It's not like I'd feel any less shame for my past habits than I do now, I'd always have to tell them about these things sooner rather than later. And when I do, they'd be terrified.
I'm deathly afraid of hurting someone out of the urges I have collected. I could just go about my life and zone any potential of romance out of my life. While I'm a very sexual person (whether that is due to addiction alone or natural inclination, I cannot say), I've been asked several times in the last few years whether I am asexual or gay or whatever. It reminded me of how little of this entire part of me I let slip through in my day to day, it makes me feel even more lonely. I see absolutely no way out of here that I'd be able to stomach with my conscience.
And what if I quit? It's not like the guilt automatically goes away if the acute urges do. As strange as it sounds in the context of everything else I've just written: What reason is there to quit? I don't think quitting porn or even just the more extreme stuff I've gotten into will change anything about how I perceive myself. And it has sadly become such a central part of my coping with life that my life without porn also would feel worse. I know these are obvious signs of addiction but I'm really considering just letting it be part of my life from now on.