Alright, so you hear this phrase sometimes, right? Sex is sex. Sounds simple enough. Like saying water is wet. Just a basic fact, a physical act, end of story.
But man, life just doesn’t work that way, does it? It gets tangled. People drag all sorts of baggage into everything. Expectations, feelings, weird power dynamics… suddenly it’s not so simple anymore. It’s never just the thing itself.
That time at the warehouse…
It kinda reminds me of this job I had ages ago. Worked the night shift at this big distribution center. Brutal work, moving boxes, loading trucks. Long hours, low pay. But hey, a job’s a job.
The supervisor, guy named Dave, he was this real blunt character. Always saying stuff like, “Work is work. Get it done.” No fluff, no trying to be your buddy. Just the task at hand. You load the truck, you go home. Simple.
And mostly, it was like that. We punched in, busted our asses, punched out. Didn’t talk much, just got the job done. Felt straightforward, you know? Like Dave said, work is work.
Then one night, this new guy starts. Young kid, bit naive. He messes up an order, sends a pallet to the wrong place. Big deal, potentially. Costs money, time.
Dave finds out. Instead of just saying, “Fix it,” like you’d expect from Mr. ‘Work is Work’, he lays into this kid. Not just about the mistake, but really personal stuff. Calls him useless, stupid, says he’ll never amount to anything. In front of everyone. It was rough to watch.
Suddenly, it wasn’t just ‘work is work’. It was Dave needing to feel powerful, taking his own bad day out on someone else. It was about humiliation, not just fixing a mistake. The simple ‘work’ got all twisted up with Dave’s ego, his mood, whatever crap he had going on.
The kid quit the next day. Can’t blame him.
So yeah, ‘sex is sex’. Sure. On the surface. Just like ‘work is work’. But peel back that first layer, and you find all the human stuff underneath. The messy bits. The feelings, the histories, the reasons people do what they do.
- It’s rarely just the act.
- It’s tangled with who people are.
- Simple words often cover up complicated realities.
Guess you see that enough times, you stop taking the simple explanations at face value. Whether it’s on the job floor, or, well… other parts of life. Nothing’s ever just what it looks like on the tin.
