What really bugs me is the often cultish attitude surrounding it. Listening to dedicated nofappers feels like listening to members of a cult (and I speak as someone who considered joining small independent fundamentalist churches): they go on about how they were in the gutter, how everything was dark and depressing and they didn't see a way out, BUT LO AND BEHOLD! They stopped fapping and now the dark has become light, the crooked straight and they have a new job and a mansion and two Russian twins as their sex slaves.
Personally, I've only tried it once so far but didn't make it for more than a week. Then I woke up in the middle of the night after having had a sexual dream. The dream was simply about me being a in dimly lit doorway, walking around the corner and then standing in front of a very sexy women. Then I woke up and was super horny. Also, my mood is usually very tense. Trying not to reveal my powerlevel for instance is very demanding psychologically. So I'm usually rather strained, tensed - and I felt that not fapping ADDED a level of tension. It did not remove the tension but added one more level.
Nevertheless, I will try it out again soon and see how far I get. My goal is, to get a certain level of "non-attachment", Being less attached from slavishly seeking pleasures is something very emancipatory. Schopenhauer knew that, the Buddha new that. The will is a source of suffering, and our adverstisement-culture trying to INCREASE our cravings (for food, sex, everything) while leaving it to the private sphere to quench this thirst, creates a lot of additional suffering.
From a Marxist perspective, I am obviously opposed to using religions and philosophies as the infamous opium of the people, and as a psychological trick to make a slave class able to better cope with their poverty etc., so that they never rise up and can easier be exploited. But from an individual perspective, it's obviously still necessary to cope somehow.
I have done a lot of fasting with food and the longest I fasted was for 75 days with a very austere diet. And I found that after a while you are really less attached to food, you gain a certain kind of independence from it, you are not so driven anymore to buy these or that kinds of food, to reward yourself with food, to go to great lenghts to increase the amount of pleasure deriven from food, and so on. This is what I mean with non-attachment. I wonder if this is possible with fapping as well to achieve a state of mind in which you are better able to deal with unsatisfactory states of mind, because you are not slavishly hunting for satisfactory states of minds (created by masturbation, food, etc.)
Finally, just like fasting of food helps to clean your body from shit like fastfood or whatevery ou have consumed, maybe fasting of masturbation can help to clean your mind from porn shit you have consumed. So, just to do it every once in a while. Traditionally, most religions have a fasting period of around a month once a year, so...