There is another striking way in which young Marx worries about sex and conceives it as a symbol of something bigger. When workers are alienated from their own activity in their work, their sexual lives become an obsessive form of compensation. They then try to realize themselves through desperate "eating, drinking, procreating" along with "dwelling and dressing up." But desperation makes carnal pleasures less joyful than they could be, because it places more psychic weight on them than they can bear (74).