Manufactured Hardship

Do you know what’s so off-putting about the rise of what I will call manufactured hardship, this entire wellness movement where otherwise comfortable people, like, really comfortable people, people who have literally every single one of their physiological and safety-related needs met, have begun voluntarily subjecting themselves to small forms of suffering, as though suffering itself is the thing that gives life meaning or weight.

It’s everywhere now. Dry January, cold plunges, intermittent fasting, cutting carbs, social media detoxes, no-porn challenges, dopamine fasts, running absurdly long distances for “fun,” or even those people who do gratitude journaling as a way to simulate humility. None of these things are inherently bad and they do occasionally help people. But it’s more the fact that they’re all framed as these heroic acts of self-overcoming, as though taking a thirty second cold shower is on the same level as clawing your way out of a concentration camp.

@shredrecovery

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The people doing this are people whose lives are already pretty great. They’re the ones for whom modernity has delivered on every single one of its promises. Endless convenience, endless safety, endless ease. And that’s the problem. The real issue here is that ease, taken to its logical extreme, turns out to be profoundly dissatisfying. Because when you’ve never faced actual hardship, you start inventing little substitute hardships to fill the void. You start calling things like cold showers “transformational” and pretending that they give you some kind of spiritual insight that people in pre-modern societies didn’t already get for free through their complete lack of indoor plumbing.

It’s no coincidence that this is mostly a first-world middle class thing. Try imagining a kid in a Brazilian favela talking about a “social media detox”. Seriously, imagine that kid deciding that the real problem with his life isn’t the possibility of getting his head blown off in a gang war, but the fact that he’s been scrolling Instagram too much. Imagine explaining to someone in a war torn country, who lives off of whatever they can muster, that they should “intermittent fast” for 16 hours a day. It’s genuinely laughable.

This fake hardship hides a deeper problem, which is that these little rituals of self-denial completely misunderstand what hardship actually does to a person. Hardship is psychological. It works on you in ways you can’t simulate because the whole point of real hardship is that it takes something away from you. Something you didn’t choose to lose. Something you will never get back.

You can’t fake that. You can’t just decide, “I’m going to feel what it’s like to have everything ripped away from me” and then step back into your comfortable life like nothing happened. Your hindbrain, your lizard-brain, whatever you want to call it, knows the difference. It knows that no matter how long you sit in an ice bath or go without eating carbs, your safety net is still there. You’re still just a click away from being warm and full and safe again.

And that is what makes the whole thing a joke. Because the people who buy into these rituals of manufactured hardship aren’t really looking for hardship. They’re looking for meaning. And they think, maybe because they’ve been told or because they’ve intuited it in some vague way, that meaning comes from suffering. And they’re not exactly wrong, but they’re also not right, because meaning doesn’t come from just any suffering. It comes from suffering that feels connected to something bigger than yourself. Suffering that forces you to sacrifice. You don’t need to endlessly “work on yourself.” You need to get the fuck over yourself.

The irony is that people who’ve experienced real hardship, who’ve had their worlds burned to the ground and their sense of self obliterated, don’t tend to romanticize suffering the way comfortable people do. They know that suffering is just suffering, that it’s mostly random and mostly awful, and that it doesn’t automatically make you stronger or wiser or more virtuous. If anything, it just rips your heart out.

But people are so desperate for something real that they’ll try to manufacture it out of the safest, most controlled circumstances imaginable. And the result is this weird simulation of struggle that’s ultimately hollow because it’s missing the one thing that makes real hardship transformative, which is the possibility of actual loss. You can’t lose what you’ve chosen to give up and you can’t grow from a kind of suffering that was never real to begin with.

So they get stuck on this hamster wheel. They will keep plunging into cold showers and fasting and convincing themselves that these little acts of discomfort are going to lead to some profound shift in their identities. But it won’t. It’ll just be another thing to post about. Another temporary distraction from the gnawing sense that something important is missing, even if they can’t quite name what it is.

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