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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.

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In modern farming, the hard part is not sitting in the tractor working on the fields. The struggle comes from running a business, taking care of financials and keeping the tractors running and cash flow positive in a very competitive, globalized environment which pays very badly.

I have done farm hand work the modern way with tractors and the old timey way with horses. If it paid as well and was as stable as computer work in the office, I'd trade my job for either.

Farm work with tractors is sweaty, dirty, solitary job but it's not particularly physically taxing. You don't need much strength most of the time, but there are times when you need to lift heavy things etc. But at the end of the day you see the field is plowed and you get to work with big machines (fun!).

Farm work with horses is sweatier and dirtier but it's a community effort with typically a minimum of two people and one horse. In the olden days it would have been a whole family group working together to put food on the table. This kind of work is very tough physically but is very rewarding and relaxing mentally.

And sitting on my ass all day in the office is also quite physically demanding in the sense that I must hit the gym regularly after work or my health will suffer.

You mention textile work, for example. Spinning yarn was an activity almost everyone took a part in. People back then carried a spool of yarn and a bunch of fibers in their pockets and spun it in their idle time, e.g. while sitting together with their family at night. It's not too dissimilar to playing with a yo-yo, or doing knitting or other activities people enjoy even today.

Pre-industrial life was not as tough as modern people think. There were many positive sides to a simpler lifestyle back then. These days we're well fed and have good health care but we work ourselves to death for no obvious reason.

I was talking more about the amount of work, than how hard it is (and it's hard, especially in summer). On the farm you start very early in the morning and there's always something that needs to be taken care of, practically until you go to bed. Now, it probably depends also on the size of the farm, number of people, type of crops and how good the land is, what animals do you keep, machines, etc. My experience is that there was very little free time of just doing nothing. Pace is slower, so you have a lot of small time-outs in between the chores, but very rarely you're like: "OK, we did everything for today, I'm off to binge watch Netflix for the rest of the day" (except in winters when days are shorter, then you get some tv time). That was my experience, at least.

Yes, farm work has periods of non stop work in spring and fall for a few weeks. And then some if there is livestock.

But the annual work time was lower for a pre-industrial farmer compared to an American office worker making ads for the web.

I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor.

You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.

On the other hand with mental work, mostly you can't stop thinking about work unless you distract yourself. Many times you don't see the outcome of what you did and it's pretty easy to think you haven't actually "done" anything.

Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns.

Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.

> You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity.

Found a guy who haven't done any hard physical labor before. You are confusing a 8-hourd hardcore shift/12 hours hard work under the boiling sun in the field with a 1-2 hour workout in a gym.

> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.

Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.

I did this for 3 years. Things you didn't mention-

Breaks exist, and are encouraged. I have to take breaks in my office setting and bosses act like it's not okay.

You get good at the Physical activity. The first month sucks, after that it's fine.

The Physical activity isn't as hard as it appears. There are often tools to aid. I found my 2 Physical jobs was more mental than Physical.

I don't like sleeping more than eight hours, unless I'm completely sleep deprived. Even then, I'll automatically wake up after about eight hours. This has been the case for as long as I can remember, including times of extremely intense mental work, like a compressed exam week at university. The exceptions was when I did manual labour on a construction site for a few weeks.

I'd get home, eat, shower, and pass out, and sleep for ten or more hours. I wanted to do some reading or watch series but I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Maybe I would've gotten used to it at some point. But the experience was unlike anything else I've gone through.

Not OP but I have done manual labour jobs (Construction jobs gen labour and mudding, seismic exploration labour, moving) for years hen we first moved to the West.

I absolutely miss being in a good shape by default. I miss the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of your labour like with mudding.

> Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.

And boy did I use to not have any sleeping issues! Slept like a baby most nights and woke up ready to go only drank coffee for the flavour. But now that I'm an office plankton I can't even think in the morning without a cup of tims.

> Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.

Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling.

Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to do as less as possible with the maintenance of their tools. And after work everyone stressed because they are afraid that this year benefits might end up not covering expenses and not knowing what to do if the price of milk drops again and your 11 year daughter does not understand why all family can't go to Disneyland during the tourist season like her friends do.

You were right about being biased.

You're confounding affluence with the difference between physical/mental labour. I've done both hard physical labour and hard mental labour, and what OP says is totally spot on. Hard physical work, even when excruciatingly tough, is most often more bearable than hard mental work. There's nothing like beig 'done' after a hard day of work. After a hard day of mental work you just feel miserable until you fall asleep. If only manual laborers were appreciated (i.e. compensated) as much as mental laborers...

My significant other does manual labor, and it's a good day when they don't want to just come home and fall asleep on the couch and those good days are rare. Even after my worst days of a software dev job, I still have the energy to come home and cook dinner, do some yard work, and other chores.

I will echo your line about wishing manual laborers were better appreciated. I have impostor syndrome, but it's not in comparison to peers in my industry, it's feeling like I don't deserve to earn multiples more then people like my spouse who break their bodies for a pittance.

well, yes, unless after hard day of work, you have more work waiting or, you go to bed worrying if weather will kill your crops, or will you be able to sell them, etc. Farming in particular is much more like running a startup, then it is like office work, where the risk of running business is someone else's problem, and you get your salary at the end of the month no matter what.

> Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to do as less as possible with the maintenance of their tools. And after work everyone stressed because they are afraid that this year benefits might end up not covering expenses and not knowing what to do if the price of milk drops again and your 11 year daughter does not understand why all family can't go to Disneyland during the tourist season like her friends do.

Sure we all worry, but that wasn't what I meant to say. I mean on the actual work day, almost everything is predictable or it has known responses. Today you have to plow the field, remove weeds, prepare seeds, milk the cows, etc. While on a mental job you get thrown literally anything at you and you're supposed to solve the problem.

Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails? What if I get old and can't get a job anymore? What if the tech I'm working gets obsolete? What if I get replaced by a cheaper alternative so the bottom line grows?

> Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling.

Maybe I should've mentioned it but I got this from talking to friends and others that have physical jobs. It's not a study, but definitely not just a gut feeling.

Even when everything appears to be repetitive it is never repetitive. You should just try a work holiday visa on a country where you want to learn a language and work at a farm. It still won’t reflect all the stress that means just changing one provider, investing in new technology from all those companies that want to make profit on you for and never be sure on whether this year you are really not going to make it anymore, knowing you are already at the bottom of the chain (primary sector) and you start considering closing everything right before getting into bankruptcy. And your friends still believe you are ok because “you work in the nature” and if you are an owner you are very likely to get the whole year salary at once and they cannot understand why being cheap is just a way of survive.

> Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails?

This cannot be serious. I've worked at startups, and the answer is: there are 50 other companies within 10 blocks who are falling over themselves to hire programmers, especially one with the gumption to try a startup. I've never heard of anyone who worked at a tech startup who then had trouble finding other employment after it failed.

If your biggest "worry" at work is that you might not become a millionaire and may have to fall back on a $150K/yr job, I really don't know how to respond, because that is nothing at all like the worries faced by people working in labor.

You're being pretty quick to judge here.

I've never worked on a startup and have no intention to do it. I live in a poor country where the average developer earns $8k/year and very few of us have any fallback. Mentioning startups was a way to relate to people here on HN.

If you don't focus on the specifics I bet you can come up with examples that relate to you and my argument still stands. Everyone has a different worry. Putting one's worries on a pedestal and discarding everyone else's as "not as bad" is pretty shallow to me.

To pay for my nice computer science education, I worked in mine exploration and later a working mine.

> Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns.

This is laughably false. Much of the day at physical jobs is spent problem-solving and jury-rigging stuff to work, whether it's figuring out how to mount a drill platform or dealing with the tailgate falling off your pickup.

> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.

The grind of this sort of work is far more mentally exhausting than programming, and I only worked there in the summers when I was in my late teens/early 20s. The two things are not even comparable. When I realised I'd worked my last day mining, I was as happy as I've ever been.

I disagree. I worked in construction and factories in the past. Problem solving at your typical physical job is easier mentally. Moreover, the duration and number of occurrences is much less. When I came home after work, I did not think about work compared to when I became a programmer. The physical exhaustion and aches were pronounced, but I didn't feel any mental exhaustion unless I was sleep deprived due to working overtime.

There's some bits of truth to this, but you're also missing some big issues.

> You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved.

Possibly, but maybe not. Just because you're working in the physical realm doesn't mean you're not working at all in the mental realm.

Additionally, it's easy to worry about injury. Sprain an ankle? Sitting at a computer, it's merely an inconvenience. In labor, you're not working (and not earning money to pay the rent) until you've recovered.

Also: most people I know in labor are living paycheck to paycheck. Financial stress is real. To combine these: many people I know don't have health insurance. It's really expensive when you have to buy it yourself. More stress.

> you know when to stop because your body will tell you to

Definitely sounds like someone who has never worked in labor. You work until the job is done. If 'your body tells you to stop' before the job is done, you've got a problem.

> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.

Flip it around: does this claim still work? Are office workers so physically fresh from sitting around all day carb-loading that they all leave at 5:00 and hit the gym or the track? Some do, most don't.

When I get home from a long day of physical work, even if I didn't have any mental issues to deal with that day, I don't exactly look forward to cracking open a technical manual.

> Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand.

Not true at all, for any of the work I've done. Just last week I had a day scheduled for 10 hours that ran 6 hours over, and that wasn't even the worst I've experienced. Why would unanticipated roadblocks appear for mental problems but not physical ones? That makes no sense to me.

Just look around at physical projects and you'll see they're just as bad as digital ones. The SR-99 tunnel was 3.5 years late after they started digging.

"I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor"

Yes you have. You could go out today and find a job doing physical labor unless you are significantly physically disabled. It's not like there is an educational barrier to all of those jobs. (Yes, I know there is to SOME of them because they require skills and performing physical labor)

As someone that has done plenty of both, you aren't contributing anything to this discussion unless you try it.

Seriously?

I don't know how it works on your country but unless I was at a starter level salary fresh out of college or I worked minimum wage, I couldn't work on any physical job without starving my family.

This comment actually diminishes physical labor implying "anyone can do it", which I don't believe it's true.

All due respect, but you are deeply deluded.

I would add that cows (or whatever other animals in the farm) don't have any idea about saturdays, sundays or hoilidays, they want to be fed (and in the case of cows need to be milked) every day, sun, rain or snow.

And it is not so ancient (medieval) as it may seem, it depends a lot on the country and the actual area.

I am told that the family (a very large one, composed of some thirty-forty people) of my great-grandfather (born in 1860 or 1861) lived in a farm (near but not so near to a village) in a remote area of the Apennines and they made one trip each year (with a horse carriage) to a village some 60 km away, on the seaside, to buy salt.

Besides that, all they actually bought "outside" were matches and some kerosene (or lamp oil), some steel/iron tools and glass and clay tableware, all the rest, including furniture, soap and candles was created/manufactured in the farm, including shoes[1] and clothes (they had wool, linen/canvas, leather) .

An older brother of my great-grandfather was semingly the first one to buy (circa 1865 or so) a rifle to go hunting, so you can add to the list gun powder.

[1] what was used largely at the time in farms were wooden clogs (or barefoot) , shoes were reserved for special occasions only

Sure we might not work as 'hard' but at what cost? Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. It's not unfounded nor is it even surprising that people are complaining and comparing their lives to the past.

That's OK and expected, but it's hard to compare two very different situations and life styles by looking just at time spent on the activity. Also 10 hours in office is not the same as 10 hours of working, no one works all the time. So I'm just saying that we need to compare things properly, taking all the angles into the account, rather than just cherry-picking some metrics and use it to attack "modern day capitalism"

> Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more.

Physically too. Watch people when they get their first office job, a lot will start packing on the weight because they are sitting and grazing on junk food all day, walk considerably less, more stress "just got an email, argh my phone is ringing, ugh what does my team lead one that is instant messaging me, ugh I'm not meeting production, do I have time to go pee before the half hour meeting?" etc.

Exactly. Hard physical work is real work - sitting at a desk tapping on a keyboard is a dream.

This seems like gatekeeping work.

it's a different job.

it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.

While many athletes do work hard, it is one thing to work hard when you are well fed and another when you are starving.

I have done both hard physical and keyboard tapping jobs in my life and I have no wish to go back to doing hard labor.

I enjoy hard labour, just not for 40 hours or more a week, every week. People doing traditional agriculture have to bust their ass during planting and harvest, but the rest of the time they aren't working that hard.

Same with sitting at a computer, doing it all the time drives me insane. I've got various hobbies and interests I'm passionate about, just not so passionate that I want to do them full time for the rest of my life.

My family comes from poverty and hard work, my grandmother died last November at the age of 96, she worked, mainly as a farmer, her entire life up until 3/4 years ago.

I've never seen her tired, she never looked like she was not gonna finish what she started because it was too much.

Truth is physical work is hard only if you're not used to it.

Your body adapts to the amount of energy you give to it.

The harder the job, the more it takes to adapt, but it happens.

Well, unless we're talking about extreme malnutrition, but I've honestly never seen it in the west, not even in the deep country of central Italy, where my family comes from.

After a while working the fields is a lot less hard than climbing a dozen steps twice a day after you sat all day eating snacks, drinking sodas and basically not exercising at all.

Hard work today, IMHO, is working at Amazon's storage facilities, where stress adds up to what's basically legalized slavery and the workers cannot even work at their own pace because they have to work at the machines speed.

Almost certainly in the sense of physical hardship -- but perhaps not in terms of total working hours. Here's another more sprightly essay on the topic:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-m...

"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks."

Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.

This contradicts my understanding of meal times. "Three meals a day" didn't really start until the industrial revolution [0]. In medieval times you ate when you got food.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692

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