calluses

The algorithm knows me well. At times in my life, I’ve been guilty of attracting social media feeds that are thick with advertisements featuring a guy who represents a particular version of “manhood,” one that I would allege is ultimately quite inferior and moreover, incomplete. Whether you’re a man or woman reading this, you know him; he’s the guy who can do it all.

The guy who wakes up at 4 AM, takes cold showers, does 100 pushups before breakfast, and definitely wants you to know about all three. The entrepreneur who turned his garage startup into an empire through sheer force of will (and a small loan from his father-in-law, but we don't talk about that). The former soldier named Buck who now teaches other men how to 'reclaim their edge' without seeking out a testosterone prescription—though he'll sell you his proprietary supplement blend for $89.99. Black and white photos. Clenched jaws. Protein powder with names like ANNIHILATE or SAVAGE MODE and the unspoken promise that if you just get tough enough, you'll finally be enough.

I feel gross even writing that. But yeah, I’ve tried to be this guy once or twice. Not to the Instagram influencer extreme, but enough to recognize him as the endgame. Enough that people in my circles probably, definitely, noticed that I was trying to re-engineer some part of my life through sheer willpower. Sometimes, almost always temporarily, it worked, and I felt that intoxicating rush of realizing I can do a difficult thing. That I can push through where others quit. That I have more capacity than I thought.

And of course, I’ve then felt the dangerous follow-up: the temptation to make that toughness my whole personality, or at least a dominant part of it. To walk through life with my jaw set, my shoulders back, perpetually ready to remind everyone—and myself—just how capable I am.

You might think that I’m here to stand against seeking out these shallow “wins” that make you feel tough and gritty. I’m not. Actually, I think they’re essential in self-discovery and growing through a sense of your own agency. But here's what nobody tells you about these flashes of becoming strong: they’re really just brief introductions to a much more complex beast. The real trick isn't getting tough. It's staying human after you do, augmented and yet still the same.

Here’s the problem. When it comes to strength, resilience, and grit, the world just doesn’t have time for the full discussion. Walk into almost any comment section, any family gathering where politics comes up, any conversation about how things used to be versus how they are now, and you'll run into this tension. Someone will mention a program, an initiative, a movement that seems to be asking for help, for accommodation, for things to be made easier. And someone else—maybe your uncle, maybe your coworker, maybe you—will feel their jaw tighten.

"People just need more grit," they'll say. “They’re soft. Nobody wants to work hard anymore. Everyone expects things to be handed to them."

The defense to that rebuttal is also familiar; it's easy to dismiss this view as political crankiness, as old people yelling at clouds, as a privileged lack of empathy for genuine struggles. Sometimes it absolutely is those things. And sometimes it's also pointing at something real.

I’ll admit, there does seem to be a growing discomfort with difficulty itself. A sense that any obstacle, any hardship, any requirement that you push through something uncomfortable is evidence of a broken system rather than just... life. The therapeutic language of trauma has leaked into everyday inconvenience, and we have to be careful about dramatizing normal experiences. If you were raised with values that emphasized personal responsibility and self-reliance, watching this cultural shift playing out can feel like witnessing the dissolution of something important, perhaps even the central thread of your world’s fabric.

I'm not here to arbitrate who's right. That's a political argument that goes nowhere productive, and honestly, both sides are partially correct and partially insufferable. Yes, systems matter. Yes, individual effort matters. Yes, some people face barriers that others don't. Yes, some people use those barriers as excuses. It's complicated.

If anything, this is an issue that the moderate, rather than the extreme thinker, should be louder about. We need to repeatedly advocate for the full discussion, with an appreciation of both viewpoints, to be had. Unfortunately moderates are, by definition, not great at being loud. We're too busy seeing both sides and apologizing for existing.

But here's what isn't complicated: regardless of how much support exists or should exist, you're still going to face hard things. Life is going to require you to endure discomfort, to persist through difficulty, to develop the capacity to keep going when you'd rather quit. The world is complex and getting more so. Problems don't solve themselves.

You need some version of grit.

The question isn't whether you do. It's how. How do you cultivate and exhibit this kind of toughness, this ability to slog through the mud, picking yourself up by the bootstraps when the bastards grind you down?

Look, the basics are clear: the novel doesn't write itself, the marriage doesn't grow itself, the debt doesn't pay itself. Someone has to show up and do the tedious, uncomfortable work, day after day, even when it's not fun. The parents who make their kid finish the piano recital even though they're nervous, who insist on the apology even when it's hard—they're teaching the ability to do the right thing even when it's uncomfortable. There's real satisfaction in discovering you can do difficult things. Self-respect grows in that soil. You earned it.

But here's where it gets tricky. Here's where most of us—myself included—mess it up. It’s such a slippery slope trying to be tough and gritty without letting it turn into arrogance, without taking a good thing and making it an ultimate thing.

When the pendulum swings in this direction, inevitably the beautiful softness of life becomes a shade more callous to us. Habits of rest, connection, beauty, perhaps even emotional availability, look a little less noble and a little more like a weakness. In the extreme, you become the kind of person who can endure anything but enjoy nothing. The soldiering person who can carry any burden but can't hold anything gently. The armor worked. But now you can't really take it off.

So how do we develop the resilience life requires without losing even a little bit of that tenderness that makes life worth living?

Well, the temptation, once you've developed some grit, is to make it visible. To carry it around like a credential. To let everyone know that you're not the kind of person who quits, who complains, who needs help. It becomes less about having toughness available when you need it and more about performing toughness constantly so everyone knows you have it.

It is the shift from tool to identity. From "I can be tough when I need to be" to "I am a tough person." And that subtle difference changes everything.

You start measuring other people's struggles by the standard of your own endurance. Someone's having a hard time and you think—even if you'd never say it aloud—"I wouldn't let that break me." You've forgotten that your toughness often had more to do with circumstance and timing and very likely some dumb luck than with some inherent superiority of character.

In my experience, men are especially prone to this. Maybe because we've carved out toughness as one of the few emotional territories we're still allowed to occupy without shame.

Anger? Sure. Toughness? Absolutely.

Literally anything else? “Are you okay, man? You seem... emotional.”

So once we earn access to that identity, we guard it jealously. We puff up. We posture. We can't receive help without feeling diminished. We mistake emotional reclusion for strength.

The grit that was supposed to help us survive becomes the thing that isolates us from our own humanity. And the worst part is how invisible this is when you're in it. You think you're just being honest about your capabilities, just not making excuses. You don't realize you've turned strength and stoicism into something you flaunt rather than something you keep in your back pocket and pull out when needed.

I wish I could be the shining example of how to get this right, but I'm the guy who wrote 2,000 words examining his own tendency toward performative toughness, so clearly I'm still figuring it out. I can only leave you with my own ideal, a standard of habit I think is worth striving for.

In 1959, there was a poor laborer named Dashrath Manjhi who lived in a small village in Bihar, one of India's poorest states. His village was separated from the nearest town—with its hospital, school, and market—by a rocky mountain. To get to town, villagers had to walk 55 kilometers around it.

One day, Manjhi's wife, Falguni, fell while crossing the mountain to bring him lunch. She was badly injured. And by the time Manjhi carried her the long way around to the hospital, it was too late. She died.

Here's where the story could have gone a hundred different directions.

Manjhi decided to carve a road through the mountain. Not to organize the village to do it. Not to petition the government. Just him. With a hammer and a chisel.

His neighbors called him "Pagal Aadmi"—the madman. And who could blame them? A landless laborer with no education, no resources, attacking a mountain with hand tools. It was absurd.

You have to imagine this endeavor was at least partly driven by vengeance. Perhaps unprocessed passion, grief, depression. And yes, those things are worth their own discussion.

But every single day, for the next 22 years, Dashrath Manjhi went to the mountain and worked. Hammer and chisel. Hammer and chisel. Through heat that regularly exceeds 110 degrees. Through monsoons. Through decades of visible failure.

Twenty-two years. To put that in perspective: that's the entire childhood of a human being. It's enough time to go to medical school, complete a residency, and have a full midlife crisis about whether you should have been a musician instead. And Manjhi spent it hitting a rock with a hammer. Now, this isn’t a letter about dealing with grief, but if it were, I think we’d have a pretty vibrant discussion here about the meaning of “moving on.”

However, as the story goes, one day Manjhi stopped.

Suddenly, there was a path. Three hundred and sixty feet long. Thirty feet wide. Cut through solid rock with hand tools. The trip to town went from 55 kilometers to 15.

When news spread, reporters came. Government officials suddenly showed up for photo opportunities. People called him a hero. The Mountain Man. They wanted him to give speeches, to accept awards, to tour the country sharing his story of determination.

And here's the remarkable part: Dashrath Manjhi didn't want any of it.

Was he still depressed? Was his traumatic, devastating loss still unprocessed? I don’t know. But he didn't write a book about his journey. Didn't start a foundation or give TED talks about perseverance. Didn't build a brand around being the Toughest Man in India. When people asked him why he did it, he didn't talk about his own strength. He said, simply: "So that no other family would have to lose someone the way I lost Falguni."

Pretty altruistic. The path wasn't about him. It was about service. About love. About making sure his wife's death meant something beyond his own grief.

This is the ideal exhibition of grit. Because after, he kept living in the same small hut. Kept working as a laborer. Stayed poor. After the path was finished and the cameras left, he simply went back to being Dashrath—a quiet man who'd done an extraordinary thing and then let it go.

You can make a lot of arguments about him, but if I may hand you my personal, narrow lens for a moment, I think Dashrath Manjhi exemplified one thing that most of us miss: grit is supposed to appear when it's needed and disappear when it's not. It's not an identity. It's a tool.

He had to be extraordinarily tough to do what he did. Twenty-two years of lonely, physical labor requires stubbornness most of us can't imagine. But the toughness wasn't the point. It was in service of something else—love, grief, compassion for future families. Once the work was done, the toughness receded. He didn't need to keep performing it.

This is the difference between grit and hubris. Between strength and the performance of strength.

Hubris makes your toughness visible, constant, on display. Hubris turns your ability to push through into armor you can't take off. You need everyone to know you're tough because deep down, you're not sure you are.

Humility keeps toughness in your back pocket. You know it's there. You can pull it out when needed. But you don't need to show it off. You can be strong when strength is required and soft when gentle grace serves better. You can be vulnerable without feeling weak, can accept help without feeling diminished, can acknowledge when something is hard without feeling like you're betraying some credential.

You’ve probably heard the adage about humility that the man (or woman) who’s really strong doesn't need to tell you about it. He just shows up and does what needs doing, then goes home and plays with his kids or reads a book. He can, at times, admit he's scared or ask for help. Sure, the toughness is there when it's needed. It's just not the whole story.

I think about Dashrath Manjhi when I catch myself slipping into that old song and dance. When I'm tempted to make my struggles visible so everyone knows I'm capable. When I start viewing other people's difficulties through the lens of "I handled worse."

The question worth asking isn't "Am I tough enough?"

It's "Can I be tough when I need to be and human the rest of the time?"

The mountain Dashrath Manjhi carved through was real rock. But the more impressive thing he moved aside was his ego. He had every reason to make toughness his identity, and he was given opportunities to spend his remaining years basking in his accomplishment. Instead, he just kept living—humbly, quietly, with the same gentleness he'd always had.

In fairness, he probably had a complex fire in his heart that may not have been entirely healthy. But his core desire was of a selfless love, and grit was the tool that he called upon to enact what he felt needed to be done in his world. And then, when it was done, he returned to his life.

To me, that's the measure of strength worth pursuing. Not the kind that hardens you into something impressive but ultimately immovable, like a heart of stone. The kind that appears when it's needed—hammer in hand, jaw set, ready to do the impossible work—and then recedes, leaving you still capable of tenderness, still open to beauty, still fundamentally human.

Build the calluses for when you need them. But keep your hands soft enough to hold what matters.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad