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The damage in this seen is far from pointless, it is intensely meaningful. Tangentially I think Moby Dick is an excellent book that is mostly wasted on highschoolers because you have to have been in a failed relationship and had a brush with death (or three) for its themes to really start resonating.
You say "give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it" but what do you think is the mechanism here, because it's clearly not simple age. An argument I get into on a semi regular basis here is where someone will say something to the effect of "a man with a gun to his head never has a choice." and I will respond "a man with a gun to his head always has a choice". As Tyler says "First you have to give in. First you have to know, not fear, know you are going to die." This acceptance is crucial (especially for men as the disposable sex) to becoming a functional adult and agent in one's own right. Without getting into spoilers for a two-decade old movie, it's worth noting that Jack ultimately rectifies his issues with Tyler by letting go of his fear of death.
His alter ego pours lye on him in order to teach him to endure pain, but by sitting there and letting the base burn him, instead of seeking a way to remove it, the character is not learning to endure and be strong and steadfast, he is self-harming.
That is not healthy psychological coping mechanism.
It may be I am indeed more female than I generally feel like, in that there is a vast difference between the bravado of this ultimately useless scene (he gets a scar for nothing, it is not a scar won in battle or from performing any useful task or action) which does seem like the sort of thing to appeal to young men who have no means of otherwise expressing how Manly and Tough they are (they're white collar middle class white boys), and how women would think about this.
(I speak as someone who managed to get concentrated sulphuric acid spilled on the back of my hand in one early job and rushed to wash it off, but by some fluke the acid was so concentrated it was too oily to penetrate and I've come away without a scar. I certainly would not have sat there gritting my teeth and 'toughing it out' for any silly show of machismo, there's enough real pain in life to learn how to put up with it).
I don't want to just say "what @FCfromSSC said" but at the same time i kind of want to want to reply with "what @FCfromSSC said"
You keep describing the pain and damage that jack endures as "useless" and "meaningless" and my reply is that it is anything but. In both the book and film the moment jack chooses to face the pain and trauma head on rather than turn away is a critical moment. It is the moment that Jack begins to take charge. Prior to the burn he has been acting purely as a spectator, It is only after the burn that he begins to act as an active participant.
And I would contend that it is the willingness to "turn in to" that pain that makes him an agent in the proper sense.
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How much? I went to a private high school that was hard-core about chemistry, and at the start of the year the teacher said something on the lines of "if you don't use more than the recommended quantities, the only thing we do here that can actually permanently injure you is alkali in the eye". A few drops of conc. H2SO4 on the hand was considered a nothingburger - it stang a bit. The same amount of conc. HNO3 was embarassing because your hand would be yellow for a few weeks. The worst accident we had was when someone filled the lab with hydrogen sulphide and we had to evacuate.
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The narrator's entire existence has been self-harm. He's lived his entire life to that point reactively, instinctively, to the point that he's incapable of choice, only scripted response. He's dead inside, a walking corpse, a moral nullity, neither satisfying his desires nor living for something beyond them. A chemical burn is the least of his worries, and the pain can be instructive. Specifically, it's pain he chooses, pain he accepts and endures rather than being driven by.
The whole point of the film is that for the characters, there isn't enough real pain, at least not in the forms they need. The reason it continues to resonate to this day is because that's true in the real world too: we are anesthetized to the point of catatonia by a culture of relentless, lazy hedonism while our lives slowly drain away a minute at a time.
The point isn't that it's super-cool to get a chemical burn. The point is that excessive comfort is deadly to the soul.
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