As someone who has taken many, many, many cold showers in Iraq and other unpleasant locales, if your character is so underdeveloped that taking a cold shower builds it up, you should be taking bigger strides.
Edit: point being, cold showers are such an unbelievably mild form of suffering that suggesting they're "character builders" is painfully pretentious. Surprised this blogger of all people wrote this. He knows suffering.
Hey Matt - thanks for your thoughts. I think mild is definitely in the eye of the beholder. Doing 50 pushups everyday would be a walk in the park for me - it might be absolute hell for someone else. A developer/designer might take 15 seconds to debug something that I could only manage after hours if not days of researching/Googling/struggling.
As I mentioned in the post - I really like warm showers and hate being cold. For me, it really was quite difficult to force myself to take a cold shower. It's now much easier.
You're right, I have gone through intense suffering - dislocating your knee, tearing all 4 ligaments and undergoing 5 surgeries will do that to you. So please have faith in me when I say that this activity was a challenge for me, was highly uncomfortable at first and required substantial willpower.
I offer my experience as something others can draw from and suggest that this might be worth doing.
I've been ending at least 80% of my showers with a minute or two of cold water since getting the 4 hour body a few months ago. It was definitely hard at first, then got easier, then got somewhat hard again (started to seem pointlessly masochistic), but all in all I feel it's been worthwhile.
suggesting they're "character builders" is painfully pretentious.
No, it's just clear that the author has a wider understanding of the issue (and more compassion) than you display. It's like criticizing people for only being able to do a couple of pushups when they first visit the gym. The fact that they keep going to the gym and working at building strength is the important part, not how many repetitions they start out with.
Recently deceased Aikido master Koichi Tohei[1] was a sickly child and had to take a year off from high school because he had pleurisy. Being forbidden to exercise, he started improving his character where he could: getting out of bed quickly and bathing by dumping buckets of cold water on himself.[2] He would later wind up leading troops in battle, so he hardly strikes me as a wimp. But since he would later stress that simple beginning exercise in some of his writings, just maybe he and the blogger aren't so "painfully pretentious" as you think.
Maybe not given the rate the First World is flying apart at the seams. I'm watching from the Third World, I've lived through a genocide, hyperinflation and massive social unrest and the signs in the US and Europe look horribly familiar.
Yes, indeed - real men build up character by punching themselves in the genitals, and then relaxing to a nice Nails-On-Chalkboard quartet for 15 minutes.
Edit: point being, cold showers are such an unbelievably mild form of suffering that suggesting they're "character builders" is painfully pretentious. Surprised this blogger of all people wrote this. He knows suffering.