The Old and the Miserable

I read a posting, yesterday, on what the author and the professionals she researched called comfort sex ... she wasn't talking about sex-with-an-ex, she said, nor about friends-with-privilege, as it has become fashionable to describe an occasional romp under the sheets with someone you might go way-back with but who is destined to remain just that. I found nothing in what she reported surprising with what I've learned in teaching and working with people in the next several generations after my own .... people Playing at the End of the First Quarter and those in the Second and Third Quarters. This has included Free Thinkers, Spiritual Folks and arguably quite Religous Folk.

One of the great bugbears of living and, perhaps, one of the great killers is anxiety. It is, arguably, the signal that sets the Psyche in pursuit of solutions ... Fight or Flight, Anger or Withdrawal, and Depression. In the Animal Kingdom, anxiety announces the imminent appearance of danger ... a Tiger about to spring out from the jungle or something equally pernicious. As Humankind has become more self-aware, less smell and instinct-driven, the range of signals that set off the anxiety signal has broadened. It comes when the future is too well known and rife with danger but, also, when we stand on the edge of the unknown ... when the danger of the future is precisely connected to its unknowability.

Sex is a well-known panacea for a host of such ills .... I agree (I think the writer's name was Donato) that Sex can be Comforting as it comes to relax both the long and striated muscles of the arms and legs, tensed and ready to respond to anxiety, and the muscles of the internal organs and their mucosa.

It is by no means the only route to relaxation ... exercise, music, meditation, prayer and Yoga can have similar results. Indeed, the opportunities for outleting, for relaxing from the madcap vagaries of life, from feelings resulting from poorer health and loss, are many.

The Miserable -- and the Old and the Miserable are no exception -- are caught in a circularity or a Catch-22, of sorts. On the one hand, their anger at the World  results from an internal notion that their ills were set upon them with some intentionality by an uncaring World; this prevents them from indulging in these variegated methods for relaxation. And on the other hand, their unwillingness to indulge in these many methods for Comforting themselves, alone or with others, intensifies their aloneness and thus their anxieties.
They cannot accept that, at least to some extent, Life is a Crap-Shoot.

Their misery deepens.

Deeply sad to watch this process.