MrPotato

This is why so many rich kids become obsessed with unusually hard hobbies (HYROX, Ironmans, ultramarathons, survival expeditions, extreme sports, Everest, etc.) They’re not necessarily masochists. They need a result where observers, and more importantly themselves, can’t immediately say “yh but your dad…” Money contaminates most conventional achievement because it can buy you the introductions, runway, education, safety net, first customers and endless second chances. Physical suffering is different. Your dad can hire the trainer, buy the bike and fly you business class to the race, but he still can’t run the last 30km of an ultra for you. And then you get this funny achievement inflation. Once normal difficulty becomes accessible, you need increasingly absurd difficulty to produce the same clean proof of competence: A 10k stops feeling exceptional → marathon → Ironman → 100km ultra → Marathon des Sables / UTMB → whatever is sufficiently painful and scarce to still mean something. Same for mountains: Everest with oxygen → without oxygen → harder mountain → unsupported → faster, etc. It’s especially funny because their normal life has usually been optimised to remove exactly the things they then seek recreationally: cold, danger, physical exhaustion, uncertainty, getting lost, carrying your own stuff, sleeping badly, not knowing whether you’ll make it. Generations of family wealth go into eliminating friction, then the descendants spend their weekends putting it back in. And of course an entire luxury industry now exists to package the hardship nicely. Black Tomato sells a “Get Lost” experience starting around £20k per person where they privately transfer you somewhere remote, give you equipment and training, then make you navigate back to civilisation while an expedition team invisibly tracks you as a safety net. Basically the final stage of wealth is paying a lot of money to recreate problems your grandparents spent their lives making sure you’d never have.