Every weekend, the muddy hills of Staffordshire reverberate to the cries and whimpers of men tearing muscles, collapsing from exhaustion, succumbing to hypothermia, or simply being trodden on by other men. A visitor from medieval times would be forgiven for thinking “plus ça change”, as he watched stumbling, shivering, bleeding bodies covered with mud crawling through swamps and tunnels. Yet the men on the Tough Guy obstacle course have paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege. “We’re getting more and more visitors from the City,” says the company. “You’re more likely to see a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer than a jailbird.” A large investment bank has even booked the premises for a week for its staff.

Tough Guy’s founding premise is something most people don’t come across in their lives any more: discomfort. It sounds strange to say it in an era of war in Iraq and bombings in the UK, but today’s twenty- and thirtysomethings are the most coddled generation ever to walk British soil. The staunch middle-class male has a life to put the Bourbon kings to shame: no regal Louis had 24/7 air conditioning, Anthony pre-shave oil, Aromessence post-shave balm, bottled Fiji water, Bliss massages, hangover cures, GI diets, sat nav, antimalarials, antacids, internet shopping, Berocca, Oregon Pinot Noir, at-home bartender services, or Room Service restaurant food delivery. For a Louis, a weekend in Morocco was more likely to be a military campaign than a leisure break.

The result? “Men live frustrated lives, and they’re after a release, a thrill: putting themselves in danger and succeeding,” says Tough Guy.

You don’t need to be a mock-paratrooper to be part of the trend. Fell running, triathlons and peak bagging have replaced country walks, the golf club and tennis as the spare-time activities of a whole generation of high-earning high-flyers. A banker friend recently missed my birthday party because he was running across Wales. When I asked him why, he said he had hopped on a train at Paddington late on Friday, booked into a youth hostel in the hills and set off on Saturday. He only stopped on Sunday evening when it was time to go home. “I just felt like it,” was his answer to both me and his family.

When Peter Vohmann, a former City trader, left London last year to start The Clubhouse, a hotel-cum-private club in Chamonix, in the French Alps, with the London bar owner Jonathan Downey, they decided to make a “difficult” basement space into a hostel-style bunk room sleeping four. They expected it to be filled with young, cash-poor snowboarders, but it has proven most popular with bankers looking for that “back to youth” experience. “Most of them have done the five-star hotel bit, now they’re looking for something more real,” says Vohmann.

One trader friend of his, who earns “more than a million a year”, recently had a blokes-only holiday for his friends. For him, even the bunkhouse was deemed too luxurious, so they spent four days in a hut with no running water, near the top of a Swiss mountain. They got up at 2am every day to climb a different peak. “It was life-affirming,” he says.

Of course, the look needs to be right. Savile Row may be thriving, but nowadays, you’re as likely to see a young entrepreneur wearing expensive gear from Belstaff, Helly Hansen, North Face or Berghaus as a Richard James suit and Oliver Sweeney shoes. Like living on the edge of a rough estate, rather than in a floral suburb, it says something about what you want to do.

The rise of street food is another manifestation of our reaction to excess. The Persian and Lebanese eateries of west London and the Vietnamese and Turkish holes-in-the-wall of east London are packed at weekends with wealthy media, City and legal types sitting on plastic chairs and eating off Formica tables.

“I see enough fancy food and tome-sized menus at business lunches,” says one regular. “This is all about eating as it always was.” One well-known London Michelin-starred chef, whose restaurant is known for its bling crowd, told me that he spends all his time off eating in “little dives in the shittiest areas”. Why? Not only is the food more authentic, so is the experience.

It’s about who you are, but also who you say you are. Vohmann points out that among the adventure seekers are the attention seekers who do it all for bragging rights. Twenty years ago, it was about the money you earned; 10 years ago, it was about where you lived. Now it’s about how close to the edge you are. “If someone climbs Mont Blanc, another guy in the office will do the Haute Route across the Alps, and then someone will do K2.” A few years ago, we boasted about how thoroughly we escaped from the harsh reality of planet earth; now we boast about how close we get to it.

Having more money simply means you can seek out greater discomfort. Richard Branson once told me he loved heading up the Amazon to a place where nobody could contact him, and the risk of being eaten alive — by anything from mosquitoes to undiscovered tribes — was reasonably high. Even when you’re one of the richest men alive, a bit of rough is what you secretly want.

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