Strength Without Witness
If you’re actively on the fitness side on Instagram, or whatever medium of social media, I’m sure you’ve seen all the caricatures and reels of “doing hard things”.
The cold plunges, the HIIT workouts that leave you on the ground gasping for air, doing multiple day long fasts, running an insane amount of miles, waking up at 3:30 am for a morning routine that takes 2 plus hours.
All in the name of “mental toughness”.
To be clear, I’m not denouncing these practices. (The two-hour morning routine seems excessive, but that’s a discussion for another day.) These activities can serve a purpose. They can be physically challenging, psychologically anchoring, and personally rewarding.
The problem, however, is many people I realize do these things for the wrong reasons;
Just because it is subjectively challenging, and it looks hard, it doesn’t mean it’s incurring really any meaningful growth to us.
It’s aestheticized “hard work” at it’s best. It “looks cool”, for social media, because that’s exactly what it is, it’s pseudo-performative, for the camera, for the likes.
Many people aren’t engaging in these challenges for the internal benefits. They’re doing it for external validation. And social media, which thrives on image, reinforces rewarding appearances over substance, because it looks good and it’s aesthetically pleasing.
The strange thing however is it’s all curated, these “hard things”; we get to decide when we want to pursue these tasks and the barrier to do these things isn’t too difficult.
It may sound like I’m attacking these self-selected endeavors of hard things, but I am more so looking at the picture of peoples intentions of doing so. Is it really to make ones self better, or is it for the approval of others?
Yes, these things are difficult. Yes, they have their place. But it seems that we’re making these things out to be so much harder and more character reforming than they really are.
Doing things that are hard in a voluntary sense have their benefits, but real the “transformation” that we’re looking for are things that we maybe don’t have a say in. Things that don’t really fit perfectly in our optimized schedules and lives.
Realizing rent is due, and your thousands of dollars short.
A loved one has fallen ill, and your responsible for their welfare.
You are laid off from your job and you don’t know where to turn.
Notice how, these things don’t fit nicely into your schedule, how they aren’t planned for, how we don’t have a say in whether we want to do these things or not.
Clearly I’m not advocating you willingly blow thousands of dollars so you can’t pay rent or quit your job for no reason, but what I am pointing to is that;
Real character-developing challenge is where the spontaneity of life happens in your face, with or without your approval, and you must choose how to respond, even if you didn’t want this, it is now your responsibility.
You can choose to skip the ice bath session if your short on time.
You can decide that you need to cut the workout short because your dehydrated.
But these other, really challenging things simply do not care about how you feel. You must deal with them.
Once again, I am not saying that these voluntarily challenging things are bad, in fact I commend when people do these things.
There is much good that comes out of doing hard things, voluntarily, things like building focus, discipline, presence, and structure.
But I believe people may be voluntarily engaging in these self-imposed hard things because they are often not confronting challenges in real life that really make a long term difference and impact in character.
They use these curated challenges as scapegoats and coping mechanism to deter from engaging in things they really need to confront.
Through this lens of aestheticized mental toughness, that is simply what much of it is, it’s the looks of being something, without actually being that thing.
Its something that looks good, but doesn’t carry into aspects of life where it truly matter.
Challenges we face in real life are the things we probably wouldn’t record, that are gradual, or things that might not look impressive in the eyes of a social media consumer.
Human psychology is strengthened by presence and awareness, all of which help develop character.
You then go through things in life that pick at the qualities of your character, not just the perseverance of your own willpower.
Practicing detachment and groundedness in moments where things don’t go your way
Acting in integrity with your values, when it could cost you something
Being honest, when the easier route is to not be
Confronting and admitting your fears, and moving forward anyway
Through these challenges, you develop your own qualities of your individual character, and you also develop a particular capacity to engage in things that reflect the values of your own life.
A capacity to:
Feel more and be more aware of presence
Endure more consistently
Love more and show up in important relationships
Act with more courage and freedom
Live with more self-respect
Doing the real hard things are things that force you to respond to the unforseeable aspects of life.
We can pursue curated discomfort, and while there is merit to these endeavors, we shouldn’t avoid the things that cause a sense of anxiety and fear within ourselves, nor should we get the two mixed up.
Through facing these challenges head on, however, we come out the other side with a feeling of increased responsibility, meaning, capacity, and the quiet strength to show up in the things that really matter at the end of the day.