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BY JENNIFER 11 Mar 2010 02:03
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An anonymous quote reads: 'Most people are quite happy to suffer in silence, if they are sure everybody knows they are doing it.' How true. Yesterday I received an email from a friend who had checked into the notorious Mayr Clinic in Austria. This is where captains of industry and ladies who lunch on nothing come to spend a week strapped to a lavatory breathing in disinfectant and surviving on rations of stale bread, for several thousands of pounds a week. Three years ago, the same group, busily atoning after a self- indulgent Christmas, would have sent a postcard from an Aman spa or even Champneys (where wine is permitted).
But that was before hardship became the new buzzword and spas became sadistic boot camps. The more suffering we can prove we have endured, the happier we are.
Hedonic hardship (meaning you suffer for your own pleasure) is more than a trend; these days, it's a mandatory competitive requirement. Take The Ashram in California, to which LA's well- heeled all flock. Here you pay $4,250 a week (flights are not included) to share a room with a complete stranger; breakfast is a glass of orange juice and dinner a bowl of soup. Eighteenmile hikes in burning sunshine with most of the clients in tears are all part of the fun.
Still, even Christmas was sold out this year. Ian Flooks, who designed the very popular Yogahikes in Italy as a less gruelling alternative to The Ashram, says it's the hardship that ultimately makes you happy. 'You realise that you don't need that much,' he says. 'We all think that hardship is about our creature comforts being taken away, but here you get a perspective on what you can get through. The hardship makes you feel stronger.' The enjoyment comes because of the pain.
But David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Canada and an observer of the new trend, says it's less about solving poverty and more about appreciating what you have. If everyone you know drives a BMW, it's hard to feel lucky, but after paying Pounds 3,000 to observe people who live without running water, we feel deeply appreciative of the Evian in the fridge. Suffering is even a good way to get ahead in the job and education market. Charles Bonas of Bonas MacFarlane, London's leading educational agency providing tutors for wealthy families, recounts how one father sent his 18-year-old son (on BA business class) to India and checked him into a five-star hotel so he could meet children dying in a nearby orphanage. Everyone now has the same perfect exam results, he explains, so the best way to beat competition is to show just how much pain you have endured. 'Parents spend all their money pampering their children and then, to show them suffering, they send them to work in an orphanage,' he says.
After the Mayr Clinic email, I received another from a friend whose teenage daughter is raising money for charity by climbing Mount Everest. I remember when teenage girls just hung out in their parents' house, downing spirits when no one was looking. Now you have to pay a great deal of money to send your child to Nepal to raise money for people they will never meet, for a cause they know nothing about. All this so they write up the experience on a university application form, and laud it over their less stoic friends.
Suffering is what most of the world endures on a daily basis. Hedonic hardship involves experiencing it in small doses and then exploiting it to the maximum. Any tragedy is an opportunity for advantage. One American student I know of wrote about the effects on his psyche when his father was sent to prison after being convicted for insider trading. He got into an Ivy League college.
Trauma - that thing that used to scar us for life and which we did everything to avoid - now leads to what psychologists call 'posttraumatic growth', a tsunami or an earthquake is an opportunity. 'The hardship industry is an attempt to make children interesting enough to compete with a whole generation of foreign first-generation kids who are really hungry and driven,' says Bonas. His advice is to hand a young graduate a tenner and tell them 'see you in a year', but arranging for them to see suffering first hand is the flavour of the day.
Suffering makes us appreciate what we have. When it's over, we feel alive, humble, grateful and hyper-aware. So what if we only experience it once a year and spend the rest of the time pampering ourselves and ignoring the poor on our doorstep? Like most things, it's all about gaining an advantage.
One celebrity scrapped a magazine shoot because she felt she didn't look hard done by enough.
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