The Rise of Manufactured Hardship

It’s hard, at first, to know exactly what’s so off-putting about the sudden rise of what I call manufactured hardship, this entire cultural phenomenon 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, arbitrary forms of suffering, as though “suffering” in and of itself is the thing that gives life meaning or weight.

The examples are endless: Dry January, cold plunges, intermittent fasting, digital 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. It’s not that any of these things are inherently bad, or even that they don’t occasionally help people; 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 par with 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, like the kind of hardship that cracks you open and makes you question the fundamental architecture of your existence, 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 by virtue of their complete lack of indoor plumbing.

It’s no coincidence that this is mostly a first-world thing. Try imagining a kid in a Brazilian favela talking about Dry January. Seriously, imagine that kid deciding that the real problem with his life isn’t the possibility of getting his head blown off in a turf war but the fact that he’s been drinking too much alcohol. 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. The absurdity of it is laughable.

But this absurdity also hides a deeper problem, which is that these little rituals of self-denial completely misunderstand what hardship actually does to a person. Hardship isn’t just physical. It’s psychological, existential. 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 may 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 phone call or 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 cultural 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 change or grow or see the world in a fundamentally new way.

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 lays bare what is.

But we’re so desperate for something real, something authentic, that we’ll try to manufacture it out of the safest, most controlled circumstances imaginable. And the result is this weird simulation of struggle, this cosplay of hardship 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.

And 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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