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Notes -
I think this sort of argument almost always becomes a debate over what exactly the terms "strong men," "good times," etc. mean, but I wanted to bring up one of the better meditations I've read on the topic that agrees with your perspective, namely Bred Devereaux's four part series of posts on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage."
Personally, I'm a bit closer to Ibn Khaldun, in that I've observed degeneration at all scales of biology as soon as selective pressure is released, from yeast in a test tube losing whatever useful (to us) gene you try to insert in them whenever it stops being necessary to survive, to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants losing the work ethic and conscientiousness that their parents or grandparents honed while toiling away to escape grinding poverty in Asia.
I tend to think of it like a spring that can be coiled and released i.e. all the valuable work comes from the release, not the compression, but it also resets you back to the initial conditions or worse after you let it go. What would be truly great is if we could achieve the advantages of so-called "hard times" or what I call "compression" without actual hardship, whether that's through some sort of mental conditioning, strong enough cultural memes, or direct genetic engineering.
I was going to link Devereaux myself, but I felt OP's post was too crap to bother with haha. Using such vague terminology and just-so stories is akin to calling over all your Motte buddies to look at Rorschach blots, and any useful commentary is despite such a thing.
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Your spring metaphor reminds me of a fair amount of literature on athletic performance: everyone agrees that training makes you stronger, but not immediately. Asking folks who just finished a marathon to run another immediately -- but faster now because they've trained more -- is not going to go well. You actually get stronger when resting after training. But rest too long and you start to lose form.
Sports science has figured out all sorts of (imperfect) models for human performance. Generally best results come from periodizing training and recovery to optimize fitness in competition, rather than year-round.
I think your idea generalizes "strong" here to include more than athletic feats. But even accepting that model doesn't make it easy: motivation for self-improvement purely for stoic self-actualization -- thanks, Maslow! -- doesn't in my experience work that well. I try (and do okay, I think) but my greatest efforts and successes in life have had non-actualization driving factors.
Even if we assume it would work -- of which I'm not certain -- it's unclear to me how we'd encourage this at a population level. There have been plenty of pop culture books that have tried, but getting people to clean their room, or even exercise modestly and eat healthier, seems to prove quite difficult for the average human wealthy enough to have a choice in the matter.
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