This kind of stuff in Fight Club is probably done very much on purpose. One big point of the book is that people (and perhaps men in particular) tend to be wired for struggle and a search for (a) meaning and (b) a reinforced identity in a social context. There's a number of ways that can be found, but the training of a monastery, the grind of boot camp, the initiation into a fraternity... that's part of what they do.

As an exercise, the astute reader may wish to translate the paragraph beginning with "Apprentice monks" above into corresponding aspects of Valley/Startup culture.