Are We Creating or Just Recreating?
How alcohol, creativity, and sex affect your optimism
My father told me that nothing is new anymore. “There’s nothing left. It’s all been done. Everything—music, art, ideas—is just recycled from something that was already made.”
This is also the man who told me that pessimism and optimism were both present in an intelligent person, so I applied that to his statement. He was a musician and music is math. Are all the calculations complete? Aren’t numbers infinite? I worried about his lost optimism.
BOOZING YOUR WAY TO PESSIMISM
Maybe he had a point. But what I’ve since settled on about his sudden pessimism is this: alcohol. It had been a daily companion for most of his life, and I think it had finally made him slightly depressed. Human beings are innovators, and to imagine that creativity is gone is pretty depressing. His bottle of scotch weighed more heavily on him at life’s end and perhaps stole his enthusiasm.
Alcohol probably started out as a thrilling accompaniment to his nightlife, his music gigs, his easy laughter. Just a dip into an amber-colored glass and a warm spread of joy could be ignited. It works for a really long time so that you don’t notice the shift. At first it’s just the occasional bad day (“Whew, too much last night”) but it always washes off and you can try again, with a little lighter pour this time. Years can go by like this.
But one day it’s no longer a joyful companion, just a habit that tempts you with its ghostly promise of fun. The first sip says “Maybe,” but that hope disappears quickly and then you’re just tired. You become a slave to its thirst.
I don’t think that’s all that led my father to his growing pessimism. He could also have been lonely, with an invisible illness taking shape, and a little fearful of what was next. His idea that nothing is new sticks with me, though, and I think of it as I witness the examples around me.
GENERATIONAL REPETITION
My nieces and nephews go through phases of maturity, making some of the same choices that sidelined me for stretches of life.
It’s easy to judge their suffering as voluntary from where I sit with my journal of life experience. They seem to be trying to avoid life’s inevitable tradeoff: That we must face ourselves truthfully, experience our pain, reason with it, make difficult choices, and learn from it all. Only then do we get to the next little resting place in between our painful growth bouts. Youth is accompanied by the idea that our entire experience should be a resting place, that the aim of life is fun, and those ugly spots should be broadly avoided. Or that suffering is only meant to be the kind that comes with waiting for others to change rather than do the changing ourselves.
Maybe the setup for each of us is the same. We will be presented with trials that we either navigate and advance from or remain stuck behind the rest of our lives. If that’s true, then dad is right that nothing is new. We are all just students of challenge. The part that makes our lives unique rather than a simple rewash of our ancestors is the way we strategize solutions to our problems. It’s an opportunity to invoke our creativity, to bring it to an everyday kind of problem, to inject a bit of color to the dullness of struggle. Or in my dad’s case, to strike an unexpected chord in the middle of a riff.
HAS SEX CHANGED OVER GENERATIONS?
There’s another repetition that surprises me today because it seems new. Young men don’t want sex the way we assume they always have. It’s been going on a long time, and now they’re open about it. I know this from TV shows like “The Valley” where a bunch of 40-year old handsome men with gorgeous wives admit they just don’t do it anymore. It’s no longer taboo to discuss it for some reason. My theories have to do with too much partying, ego vs. genuine intimacy, and whether or not they have sex alone.
Since my thirties, I’ve talked to many women who are unhappy about the amount of sex their partners wanted in a committed relationship. In my mother’s time, women complained about men wanting too much. But in my lifetime, more women worried it was not enough. I can’t be sure whether this is a new phenomenon or a recycled one that we’re just learning about because technology has brought us through a tell-all period. In the past, shame would have accompanied this topic, along with the misconception that men were the physically-hungry gender and women the tolerators. I’m still not sure that was ever true but the idea’s prevalence kept anyone in the wrong category silent. They’re all talking now. And this is not just a problem for straight couples.
My husband and I watched a documentary a few years ago hosted by Christiane Amanpour that was called “Sex and Love Around The World.” She seemed an unlikely host for this topic so we watched. Each episode was filmed in a different city and explored that region’s culture as it applied to sex. The one that surprised me the most was Tokyo . Apparently, the Japanese have sexless marriages and skin-touching clubs. Some prefer sex dolls. It struck both of us as bizarre, but we’re old Americans and we’re staying in our lane. It’s difficult to relate to an idea that people would rather have physical contact with an A.I. image rather than a living breathing body, but there is a trend toward it. I’m not sure how future generations will get around the baby-making part though.
Sex does something for emotional intimacy between two people in a relationship, beyond the physical act, and I suspect that creativity in our view toward life does the same. We need to believe there is something more to be made, different to do, a uniqueness attributed to us even if only a new way to organize the closet or reach retirement. We need optimism.
FINDING MEANING IN A BALANCED WAY
There are many paths to finding meaning in life. During the sixties, people relied on sex, drugs and rock and roll for inspiration. But today’s reflection is more focused on our hope that meaning is present at all. This is also about sex, alcohol, and jazz. And for that, I will quote my Uncle Victor who told me, “Balance in all things.” So you’ll have to measure these out for yourself, but I’d say that doing so with an optimist’s view will lead you down a more pleasurable creative path.
May you find creativity in ordinary tasks, balance in all forms of pleasure, and never give up on optimism in your search for meaning.
I think that's one of the hardest parts of aging, to continue to find newest in everyday life. It doesn't just come our way, like in our youth, honestly, we've seen it all. We learn to seek it out.