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Our Culture Was Built For Masochists
A forgotten personality disorder might be the reason you can’t escape “the suck”.
When I was a kid, my wrestling coaches taught me how to “embrace the grind”.
To become a decent wrestler, you have to put in an obnoxious amount of time on the mat, you have to cut ridiculous amounts of weight, and you have to persevere through countless injuries and other physical and mental obstacles. You have to become strong enough to overcome anything that stands in front of you and victory.
You have to love the pain.
If I’ve learned anything from my 12 years in combat sports, it’s that my wrestling coaches weren’t wrong when they said that “embracing the grind” was the key to becoming a better athlete. They were wrong, however, when they said that wrestling was a metaphor for life. Wrestling is not a metaphor for all of life, wrestling is a metaphor for achievement.
Life is more than just achieving stuff.
To do anything exceptionally well, you have to be able to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You have to be able to persist through pain, no matter the cost. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our cultural obsession with masochism.
I mean, wouldn’t everything be easier if you actually enjoyed pain the pain of burning yourself out, following orders, and breaking your mind and body?
Some people do. I’m one of them.
The curious case of Masochistic Personality Disorder
In the 1980s, a personality disorder was considered but not accepted into the diagnostic manual. This disorder was called Masochistic Personality Disorder.
When most of us hear the word masochist, we probably think of 50 Shades of Grey, but psychologists have used this term in a more formal setting for decades now to describe people who just enjoy beating themselves up. In psychology, you can’t technically be diagnosed with a Masochistic personality, but this trait is still something that psychologists think about when interacting with patients.
In other words, Masochistic personalities are real, even if they’re not in the same…
