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Notes -
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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