As a Chinese uni student, I grew up indoctrinated to believe in the positive effects of pain and suffering. Quotes are numerous to name like only by eating (enduring）enough hardships will you become a winner above others. Textbooks are fraught with passages, propagating how tormenting hardships shape resilient, iron characters of underprivileged figures and lay the foundation for their later success. By and large, Chinese high school is a disaster for students which impose on them a brutal 10 plus hour schedule. Many parents go even further and send their students to private cramming school when their kids have one or half day on a weekly basis. I became accustomed and entrenched in that kind of rat-race philosophy until the point at which I was hit by depression the third year of high school. I thought it was my own fault from the jump and panicked when anybody else studied day and night for the exam while I was tortured by brain frog, sluggishness and gastrointestinal disorders. I felt a misfit in the world, where other students were studying day and night but I stayed home. The role recognition anxiety torn me apart and it also displeased my parents. My father attributed my bodily discomfort to my own fantasy and advised me not to overthink or catastrophize.
Subconsciously my parents and teachers all saw it not a big deal and I was just too vulnerable to shoulder the due pressure something just like GenZ snowflake cliche. Fortunately, unwilling though my parents were, their love for me eventually overrode the social conditioning Chinese society has long impacted on them. They knew my struggles and brought me to psychiatrist and my school day were pressed a long pause. I did get better after taking medication and redress the ingrained and toxic Darwin mindset. Suicide rates among Chinese students are skyrocketing these years. Sadly, a lot of middle aged or older people accused them of being too fragile, not toughened and fucked up enough. Those comments abound below social media comment section. I wanna know do American parents or the whole society in general tend to preach the value of hardship building and glorify suffering that should have avoided.
15 comments
Glorify? No.
Teach kids to endure needless suffering? No
Teach our children to handle it with grace and fortitude? Yes.
There is some “shake it off” or “tough it out” mentality. Some of that is good. You can’t whine and be overwhelmed by every minor bit of suffering.
But by and large we are trending towards not ignoring suffering, especially mental suffering which historically was ignored or seen as weakness. Nowadays we recognize that mental anguish is as bad as disease or physical pain if it is bad enough.
The country’s too big to generalize, but sure, there’s some of this. Plenty of people i know had to do ridiculous tasks to “build character.” There’s a whole self-flagellatory aspect, that suffering is purifying or inherently noble somehow.
“Well *I* work 90 hours a week and wake up at 5, you’re wasting your day sleeping eight hours and seeing your children,” that kind of thing. Obviously that isn’t everybody, but it’s there.
No, we do not glorify pain and suffering as as positive things. I think we try to teach our kids resilience if they face adversity, but we don’t want them to have hardships if they don’t have to.
My grandparents were children during the Great Depression, and adults during World War II. They suffered unbearably hard times. And they did not want their children and grandchildren to ever have such dire times. They said that they hope they carried all that pain so we didn’t have to.
I think its more common to ignore pain and suffering outside of a scholastic context. I think it happens more in sports, work and social scenarios. Also our public school (at least in my state) is less rigorous than what you describe. Its very possible to take easy classes and be only be there from 8-2 everyday. It’s seen as important, but it’s not as seen as the only thing you know?
>do American parents or the whole society in general tend to preach the value of hardship building and glorify suffering
Used to. It’s an open ended question whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
American parenting has fallen into two broad camps. The progressives, who champion Ben Spock and are into overprotective helicopter parenting, and the conservatives, who rally around Robert Heinlein and think we should bring back lawn darts.
No.
We do not glorify pain and suffering, nor do we believe in causing kids to suffer. We teach our children to endure pain and suffering when necessary, but the duty of a parent is to prevent as much of that as possible. If you allow your children to suffer needlessly you fail as a parent.
I’m Asian-American so I have some idea of what you’re speaking to.
No, not in anywhere near the same way. I think older generation Americans have a bit more of that mentality, that enduring suffering is a sign of good character. The phrase “It builds character” is a trope.
However, modern US culture places a lot more emphasis on charting one’s own path in life and pursuing personal happiness as a life goal. (Honestly, almost to a fault). I would say modern American culture is almost on the other extreme now where people are encouraged to cut things out of their life altogether that are causing them to suffer.
One thing I think that’s emblematic of this difference is the amount of younger Americans cutting off contact with their parents these days. Rates of parental estrangement have really risen over the last decade or so because many younger Americans feel that not even the parental relationship should be allowed to cause them pain. So, if the relationship with their parents is not a happy one, they feel it’s better to cut contact.
Whether this is right or wrong, this is an extreme difference from Asian cultures.
In the US, pursuing life paths outside of formal education or traditional career paths is more admired here than in Asia.
What we do glorify is persistence and grit, which I would say is slightly different from glorification of suffering.
I think in Asia there’s more glorification of someone’s ability to work hard and do well within a set system, even if it causes them to suffer. In America, there’s more glorification of someone’s ability to challenge, change, and/or refute a system, even if it causes them to suffer. So, slight difference there.
American culture celebrates and glorifies entrepreneurship as an expression of this. Entrepreneurship is very hard and shows that someone was willing to suffer and endure, likely despite setbacks and failures.
However, it’s admired because it’s assumed that the end goal they were suffering for is their personal happiness and life fulfillment. They didn’t like the options the system gave them, so they took a risk, disrupted the system, worked very hard, and made their own option.
In any case “the pursuit of happiness” is a core tenant of American culture since it’s one of the main principles this country was founded on.
It’s listed as an “unalienable right” in the first part of our Declaration of Independence from England:
> *We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.*
I don’t feel that as a whole society we teach kids they have to suffer or that suffering is good for them. I think these days we are more aware and care more about mental health of our kids. If a child is struggling they might be given accommodations instead of punishments. Most parents are probably satisfied if their kid gets decent passing grades. You don’t have to kill yourself studying day and night to get into a college here.
Jesus that upbringing sounds aggressive
Oh my god no
Not usually, but growing up in the 80s in the rural south there was a lot of attitudes of “suck it up” and “walk it off” when dealing with pain.
I don’t know about “glorifying” suffering, but we recognize that this is part of life and the ability to persevere through it is important. So we do have maxims like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “no pain, no gain”, but they’re just acknowledging the above truth without glorifying pain (unless you’re listening to certain fitness professionals).
I wouldn’t say “glorify”, but experiencing some hard times and dealing with it is part of life, and it builds character. If everything is handed to you or everything is made easy, you don’t have the ability to deal with it.
My wife and I had some rough years financially. We now sometimes look back almost fondly on the times we went to Aldi with $20 cash and that was our grocery money for the week. We’d go through the store with me adding everything that went into the cart and we’d try to guess the exact total (including tax) when we got to the checkout.
I don’t think many people are taught that suffering is good for suffering’s sake. I think the attitude is more along the lines of you need to be able to endure the hardships and come out a stronger person. Hardships come up on their own they do not need to be self-imposed.
Kind of yeah, toughness and overcoming adversity is prized, but not normally that extreme.
Asian-Americans are the only Americans who get it that bad