Strife serves the individual because it represents the inverted impression of work being done. Without it's character of resistance, there would not b anything against which to cast our efforts: purchase-less work, or, action without traction. If this seems backwards, that's because it is, therefore, strife.
I can engage the world meaningfully without saying that it only runs on friction, noise and histrionics. It's not work for the sake of distraction that I want. It's a sense of relevant engagement that I'm looking for.
An image that comes to mind is Jean Claude van Dam, to illustrate what is wrong with strife. He actually had very fluid kinetics from his dance training. Putting that to work for martial-arts flix though meant that he was going to have to appear tougher than a ballerina. So, to appease the gods of kayfabe, he's always flexing and holding all this tension to make him seem, well, more formidable. This then informs the nether regions of what we think a confrontational stance looks like. In actuality however, all that flexing is a waste of energy and motility that only serves the spectacle of combat at the expense of actually providing a lasting fighting strategy.
I'm so Discordian that I regect the limitations of strife, favoring a Daoist interpretation of it instead. Otherwise it's just cognitive dissonance for the sake of cognitive dissonance.