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Notes -
The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.
For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.
The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.
Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)
Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.
The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.
As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.
Life is hard. Some people are shielded from this but just by looking at nature, we can see how savage it can be.
I'd never want to the ones that I love through the hardships I went through. This can create a generation that underestimates how hard life can be.
Strong men like good times too. Here's the thing, there are times when life gets hard, that someone has to act. Weak men tend to fail here. This makes for bad times.
Go to a construction site, how many weak men do you see?
As I said, pretty much no one embodies the pure archetype. But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering. Not a 1:1 correlation, but certainly not orthogonal.
The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too". This is what I'm attempting to expose and warn against in my post.
You should examine your biases.
You misunderstood me. Please, go work on a construction site for a few months. Learn what it takes to actually build something. Learn what that strength actually means because judging from your observations, you're rather ignorant.
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Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.
As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.
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