The Jokes Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Masochism is not the path to mental toughness

July 17, 2025

Sisyphus, Franz Stuck (1920)

There's certainly a lot of misery to be found in human life. We fractally encounter instances of loss, change, discomfort, and inconvenience that affect us at different levels on different time scales. You get sick. Your girlfriend dumps you. You lose an SD card with a lot of important files.

We also often deliberately seek out experiences that involve suffering. People lift heavy objects at the gym over and over. People pay to get choked out at BJJ. People climb difficult things at bouldering halls. People run marathons. In the moment, these experiences aren't particularly pleasurable.

The key tool at our disposal to navigate experiences of suffering is mental toughness. We develop various psychological techniques to convince ourselves that we can get through it. We won't surrender. We won't give up. This cognitive mechanism is just as important as the raw, physical strength required to get through whatever instance of suffering we're encountering. Even if we have enough physical resolve, we won't make it very far if we don't believe we can do it. Equipping yourself with a high level of psychological resilience is a reliable way to overcome adversity. It’s the most powerful tool in our arsenal to cope with the hard times, of which there will be many.

I've noticed two common techniques people use to incorporate mental toughness. The first path is best exemplified by characters like David Goggins and Jocko Willink. Both of these figures have become macho self-help gurus espousing the value of discipline and unwavering determination. These guys are easy to make fun of because of their (frankly masochistic) embrace of suffering. Their philosophy is to wake up comically early in the morning, take ice-cold showers, lift weights, and run marathons all with self-improvement books on 2x speed blaring in their ears to remind them they still aren't doing enough. As many memes have pointed out, they might as well be dining on broken glass.

If there were any openings for Sisyphus' boulder rolling gig, they would take it in a heartbeat. The explicit goal here isn't even physical fitness or any positive result that might come from these habits. The suffering itself is the goal. As they repeat ad nauseum, they do it because it sucks. Physical fitness, or the supposed perks of cold showers, are purely incidental. This mindset is gospel among the increasingly popular spheres of hustlebros and self-described sigma males who preach this strategy of watered-down stoicism. There are endless curated short-form videos of people’s “morning routines” that involve a long series of miserable activities to start the day.

On the surface it seems like a straightforward way to build mental toughness. We might understand it like a muscle. If you put in consistent reps of doing uncomfortable things, pushing yourself to the brink of failure on a regular basis, you psychologically adapt and become mentally stronger. You slowly build callouses on your mind that make you rugged and tough.

But there's an issue with this approach. This sort of masochistic mental toughness relies entirely on willpower. They white-knuckle their way through suffering with gritted teeth. It's sheer force. For the vast majority of people, I don't believe this is a particularly reliable thing to tap into. Willpower is fickle, depending on fluctuating energy levels and erratic reserves of motivation. In the realms of fitness, dieting, and habit-building, willpower is famously eschewed in favor of building systems, reducing friction, and shifting one's identity. These strategies are less exciting to hear about in a motivational YouTube Short, but they're demonstrably more effective in the long term.

This mindset is also profoundly individualistic. They’re working not just against themselves, but against the rest of the world. The toughness is demonstrated in isolation and any community around these activities is incidental. They perform these feats of self-punishment on social media and demonstrate their purported discipline to play status games.

The masochistic mental frame is fetishizing the suffering. The object of attention is the negativity of the experience rather than any potential positive results. They torture themselves and wallow in the agony of it. The internal dialogue might sound something like "This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks." It's an absolutely miserable way to live.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative path that doesn’t involve self-flagellation. There's a much more pleasant way to tap into mental toughness and achieve all the same benefits: Morale. Rather than tapping into the negativity and immersing yourself in the suck, laugh at the suck in playful defiance. Rather than trudging through your obstacles for the sake of the trudge, believe in the value and necessity of your goal on the other side and gracefully move towards it. It’s an act of rebellion against hardship.

What I’m getting at here is best understood with concrete examples. Soldiers in war sang marching songs, and cracked black-humor jokes poking fun at the bleakness of their circumstances. Sailors belted sea shanties during long, grueling voyages to pass the time and make it more bearable. Even in some of the worst conditions imaginable, people find levity.

The terrific YouTuber Geowizard is famous for embarking on what he calls “straight-line missions,” attempting to cross entire countries in a completely straight line on foot. The immediate moment-to-moment experience of such a mission is largely unpleasant. He’s hopping wobbly fences, wading through brambles, scaling up and down massive changes in elevation, and slogging through untamed wilderness. The goal he’s aiming for is also entirely arbitrary — it’s a challenge he’s made up for himself. But through all of this he has remarkable morale. When he encounters an unforeseen obstacle, his first instinct is to crack a joke. When the long days of exertion start getting to him, he manically sings songs to himself. None of this behavior appears to be forced. His disposition is to confront these situations with lighthearted amusement.

via GeoWizard

A significant advantage of the morale approach is that it spreads much better in social groups. Willpower is lonely and individualistic, but morale also supports your friends. It binds you together with your companions and strengthens the sense that you aren’t alone — you’re in this together. I’d much rather have somebody at my side cracking jokes with a smile on their face than somebody reminding me how much the experience sucks.

To draw from a personal example here, around 7 years ago I was moving into an apartment with my best friend for university. We embarked on a long 3-hour drive from our hometown, driving in my mother’s car with a trailer hitch carrying a couch, some desks, and various other pieces of furniture. It was a beautiful sunny day, but midway through the drive, on the highway, a torrential downpour of rain began. That rain would continue through the rest of the day. Our furniture was nearly ruined. When we attempted to enter the house, the key didn’t work, so we needed to call the landlord to get us a new one. This cost us $50. When we could finally start moving — an activity that generally sucks in the best of times — we were soaking wet, carrying heavy, slippery furniture up slippery stairs. Plenty of other small inconveniences came up as well that I won’t waste your time mentioning. Suffice it to say, it absolutely sucked. Nearly everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. And yet, we laughed through it all. We managed to find the humor in it. Every further inconvenience just added to the absurdity of our misfortune. Morale was incredibly high.

We could have powered through that experience with willpower alone, but it would have been a wretched experience. The atmosphere would have been gloomy and solemn. Instead, we were smiling and laughing. Despite the circumstances, the atmosphere was cheerful. We were invigorated by the camaraderie and the motivation came easily. We didn’t have to summon it through sheer force of will.

In order to tap into morale you need two things. First, you need a concrete goal that you believe is important and worthwhile. The suffering can’t be in vain. Your goal is important to hold in mind as your north star, giving purpose and meaning to the suffering. For the willpower enjoyers, attention is directed towards the suffering and the goal comes second. For the morale heads, the suffering is in service of the goal. Attention is directed towards the rewards you might reap if you persevere.

I tend to agree with the classic platitude that the journey is more important than the destination, but having a concrete destination in the first place is necessary to make the journey surmountable. Climbers are more interested in the action of the climb (the journey) rather than topping out (the goal). But if there’s no top to reach, they would just be aimlessly fumbling around on rocks. Geowizard’s goal is humble but effective. He wants to touch the water on the shore at the end of his line, and then immediately go to the nearest pub for a pint and a hearty meal. Every step he takes brings him closer to that glory and celebration. The journey is about something.

The second thing you need is levity. You need some level of detachment from the suffering such that you can recognize the absurdity of the challenge only to skillfully defy it and move forward. To laugh at hardship is to rebel against it and surmount it. You don’t succumb to despair; you stand above it. There’s evidence to back up this strategy too. Appreciation of dark humor is tied to higher levels of resistance to negative emotions.

Morale strikes me as the optimal path to mental toughness. It’s lighter, more sustainable and more prosocial. Unlike the white-knuckle grindset, it actually inspires you to keep going. It’s easier to imagine Sisyphus happy if he’s genuinely in good spirits. Do it with a smile on your face. I haven’t seen Jocko Willink or David Goggins smile once.