There is also an aspect of overcoming obstacles. The article intensely focused on the point that these guys had to leave their families and travel hundreds, thousands of miles to become miners. By definition these were the guys with the psychological makeup to survive, thrive in changes and challenges. So now they're stuck underground, but the population is already self selected for to be the peak achievers of a "can do attitude" in their culture... These dudes are old school tough.

If you just picked a random collection of cubical dwellers out of an office, they would not be intensely self selected for toughness and psychological endurance like these guys... they would be toast in a scenario like that.

I won't pretend I've ever gone thru anything like these guys, but in my .mil reserves time a long time ago, you don't volunteer to join and go to basic training unless you self selected as the small segment of the population who can survive basic training. So no anxiety needed. If you couldn't hack it you wouldn't be here to begin with, and that calmness gives strength, sometimes unnatural strength, when you need it. This sucks; but I can do it, that is the mindset. But again, I emphasize these guys are both tougher and have gone thru far worse than I've ever seen, I only caught a taste of what their life is like.

This is the aspect that is sometimes not understood about personal growth thru suffering. Its not the suffering or the pain that is the point, or going thru the motions of a ritual. Its the toughness.

There is a startup aspect to this. Old lion says something like "do it and fail at it, you'll be better off having failed". New lion is all WTF. The intentional rational cultivation of toughness, that is the point the new lion might not get.