In my case, there was no wanting to be a tough guy, but I ended up that way whether I wanted to or not. You must be significantly younger, or have lived in safer places. I can assure you that when I was coming up in the trades, OSHA was nowhere to be found. I started out at age 15, digging footers and pouring concrete in the FL sun without any SPF, either. After that I did hot tar and shingled/tile roofing with no UV protection, nor safety lines. Miles of rockwool sound blankets without dust masks in hospital construction, either. We hung inch thick gypsum core board on a 4 level bridge connecting two hospital buildings together, 70ft in the air using 2 x 10s and 12s for scaffold planks all of which we had to rig ourselves. I won't even get into all of the asbestos I scraped from red iron on commercial remodels. Not one workers comp claim in nearly 50 years in construction and I'm still in it full time.
Smoked Lucky's and Marlboros for 35 years, and was up to 3 packs/day when I finally quit at age 50. It's nice to see now that people wear plastic gloves to chop an onion or even loosen a lug nut but none of that was even available back then, when we could also chain smoke those Marlboros on a commercial flight to any destination.
I survived the immediately dangerous stuff and most of the long term stuff as well. Meanwhile, we have people using their health insurances as licenses to really bad health choices. I had one fellow on a forum who is nearly 400#, say that my health insurance should drop me for refusing the jab. Meanwhile he's got as bad a case of diabetes as a person can have, a bypass surgery, and a host of other weight related problems and a pharmacy's inventory worth of meds he takes daily. Me, I'm still hovering around my ideal BMI, with a healthy back, knees and hips, in spite of 20 years hanging and finishing drywall.
My hearing? I can't hear anything past 12khz, but music still sounds good to me so I guess I got lucky there. I do think about it though when things are getting loud. I wear my safety glasses when I should, most of the time. I have more visible scars on me than I would like, but at least it shows where I have been, a lot more than those tattoos the safe and soft people cover themselves with, these days.
