Maybe you should think about it less as "coddling" and more as "people are different and stuffing them into the same box is runs the very real risk of failure or unhappiness." But that doesn't validate your own life choices the way your posts do, so I can understand why you might not.
The idea that "everyday life" should demand that everyone operate in cognitively subpar conditions for them because you like them is a silly one. The last time I woke up before 9AM when I didn't have a flight to catch the next morning was 2013; I will have been successfully running my own consultancy (and making half again as much money with about half the work that the "everyday life" equation specified) for three years now at the end of this month.
Weird how that life works and works well without sneering at people who do like to get up and work early.
You sound like every single martial artist that I've ever met, and almost every single one of them has - just like you - an overblown sense of how tough and knowledgeable they are, and how everyone around them is a pathetic worm who just needs to harden up and get to work.
Funny thing is getting up early to go to the gym or do some course work isn't tough, almost everybody who goes to college does that. Long days? College. (17 hour days for weeks on end through every semester for me.) You get weekends, college students don't. You get paid for your hours, college students need to work a job outside of their full time (40+ hour) studies.
At least in New Zealand, universities structure their courses so that only the top percentage of the population can get through the stress and workload - something like an 80-90% dropout rate by the end of the bachelor's degree. (Weren't you bragging about an 80% dropout rate in your course?)
What is tough is successfully completing something that medical professionals tell you that you very likely can't do, whether it's a college degree in an "inappropriate" field or learning to walk again.
Put this another way, if you know you can do something, is completion of it worthy of note?
Yeah, gatekeeping and all that jazz, I agree there, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the average US college freshman student probably does not have it as 'tough' as the average US boot-camp inductee. I would extend that to the integral of 'toughness' over the tenure of the average US college 4th year student versus the average 4th year US service member, but it's more of a crap-shot with the Air Force ;).
The average 4th year US service member will probably have put up with massively more crap than the average college graduate. Which makes them tough in a specific way. That seems plausible enough :)
What I was objecting to
A) "Life is tough/ college isn't".
Put in those terms, "Life is tough, X isn't" works for basically anything. And, I would argue, military service is closer to college (specific schedules, insulated from real world, the amount of time spent on PS/XBOX) than real life.
B) the tone that seems to indicate that the military has a monopoly in all types of toughness.
