Think of an upside down parabola. What you could name as 'the feet in the air' for the tips of the curve at the top; they represent those of the most satiated over-compensated decompression while those at the bottom of the U-curve are the most frustrated and dissatisfied. One could say that the two legs of the U-curve are metaphors for an indefinite number of such legs (stems) that could exist in a 360 degree pattern circling around. The metaphorical two stem-legs represent the juxtaposition of contrasting material fates and their reflective opposite equivalents.
Getting back to decompression from emotionally confining circumstances. I'm beginning to think that our feral, pre-complex-acculturaton to socializing from our genetic nature-back to the pre-neolithic hunter-gatherer days: there was more intuitive, aka gut-based, behaviors than the present pre-programmed templates-informal and formal. The acculturation is much like an exoskeleton on the psyche. When it is ubiquitously common condition shared by most, there is the same common acceptance.
When stark differences and disparities become acknowledged, then the privileged "freedom" of some affect those of more restrictive privileges , at first, with personal dissatisfaction with one's condition before seeing factors beyond one's self as contributing-to-conspiring against one's aspiration for equivalent satiated satisfaction.
In my case, going from having dominant control of the when, how, and where of my time to the protocols of a part-time job has revealed the contrasting emotions of little-to-no need to decompress at the end of a work day to seeing the need for a much needed recess for my cognitive energies to matters more resonant and congruent to the former privilege of being the determiner of my time, than the now one who's time is obliged for less enjoyable means.
If I in a relative less onerous and dangerous condition can be so consciously aware of this cognitive contrast, what about those for whom work is a dire or necessary, if not involuntary subordinate necessity. What ever free time and space they could get, it would not be unexpected for them to seek an amplitude of decompression that would be more acutely intense than me typing these words of analysis for you with relatively equivalent decompression needs similar to mine. And those whose conditions are more restrictive and repressive on their latitude of options? Compound that with physical and emotional assaults-micro/macro-on their persona for which simple unwinding decompression is not enough!!
It's the nature of the depths and the crushing intensity found at those depths at the bottom of that U-curve that the crushing nature of the acculturated socialization is known for its literal bare, nakedness of brutality. Everything up the chains and their reflective, juxtaposed opposites are the less traumatic versions of what occurs at the bottom of the U-curve (bottom of the crab basket) of emotionally 'humane' survival.
