You don't do martial arts to fight. You do it for the calm, discipline, exercise, and opportunity to do cool stuff like when I got to break solid ceramic tiles

You don't do martial arts to fight. You do it for the calm, discipline, exercise, and opportunity to do cool stuff like when I got to break solid ceramic tiles with my bare hands. These are the only rational reasons. You'll maybe be in one or two violent situations in your whole life (maybe a few more if you don't know how to, ya know, run away from them) and it's a hundred to one that those situations will call for empty-handed fighting. Spending multiple hours a week training for something you have maybe one in a thousand chance of actually using productively isn't the smartest thing to do with your time. If you think you're doing anything more than staying in shape and building discipline, you're fooling yourself. This wasn't intended to be an argument, btw. Just hammering the point home for anyone else thinking empty-handed martial arts is a viable self-defense strategy.