Hacker News Reader

Comment by go_elmo | Hacker News Reader

Thats too romantic - physical labour isnt funny when its repetetive and continuous, which most are. Also not using your head is frustrating / degenerative. What helps me most is keeping a balance, making mid day breaks for long runs outside or a nap does miracles. But I agree, it also needs mental relief to regenerate, but doing sports gives at least minimal breaks.

View on HN

You're right, I think I need to be more specific, assembly line work in some factory might count as physical labor, and that might not be any better, I can't say as I've never had that job.

I'm thinking more in terms of the article, construction work, farming, and the more pre-industrial kind of physical labor.

For me specifically, it was construction work, bus boy, landscaping, janitorial work and military training. All these just involved constantly moving my body in various ways but also I'd say not in a repetitive at risk of RSI kind of way. So it really just felt like exercise.

Yeah, it was great. Until I fucked both of my knees and my back, and have been in pain ever since. It affected me mentally, as well lol.

No one helped me, no one even thanked me.

Take the mental work. At least you can always exercise enough to be spared them physical injuries.

What happened?

Probably the most common pre-industrial job was farmer, which is super repetitive. Imagine a task like tilling with a hoe, which would be a very repetitive and strong swinging motion.

It’s repetitive in the sense that one does the same thing many times but not in the sense that one does the same thing day in day out as there are many things to be done and they vary throughout the year.

Right, you're likely never going to hoe so many days in a row that you develop RSI.

The guy who did develop it is likely the guy who invented the plow

It’s also a lot more complicated, at least now. While some tasks are repetitive, the activities rotate throughout the year. But it’s even more than that. I worked for a farmer before joining the Navy, and talking with him was interesting. Incredibly intelligent guy who I believe could have went on to do anything in world if he wanted to. Why did he settle with farming? It was his family farm, he ran his own business, but the answer that struct me even more was this, he said, “I get to wear a lot of hats. I am an engineer, those tobacco barns, I designed them. I am a mechanic, my old IH tractor breaks, I fix it. I am a business man because I make deals with local restaurants to sell my produce. I am a scientist, I work with the state university on soil studies and have a plot dedicated to running experiments with the university.” He listed some more but I can’t remember them all. The point is, for him, being a farmer let him be everything he wanted to be.

Is your farming experience strictly from Harvest Moon?

Hoeing is a great full body workout. You go pretty fast if you swing from your hips without moving your arms too much, and your joints don’t feel strained either. I have seen people swing the hoe like an axe but I suspect this is not the most sustainable technique.

While exercise is good, it's worth noting that in those lines of work your body wears its out after decades of doing it, and injury rates are fairly high.

When I lived in Cambodia I saw a lot of Abercrombie-model looking guys in their 50s. They were farmers, I think. I’m currently in Italy living with a farmer in her 60s who’s in great shape. The other day she dropped cold into a front split. I don’t want to say farm work is a panacea — I know it depends on what you’re doing and how you do it — but my own experience plus a book by Esther Gokhale have convinced me that healthy work builds your body and doesn’t tear it down.

I do think there’s a lot of physical labor that isn’t healthy. And there’s also labor that’s kind of on the line, like heavy lifting — if done properly it’s safe, improperly and it can cause damage.

Sitting in an office chair for decades doesn't cause great health outcomes either.

But it's the norm in our class, so we accept it as natural.

health outcomes are relative, though.

office work will not cut your working life short with something fatal or totally unable to work.

I’ve done factory style extremely repetitive physical labor, it’s almost meditative as you can kind of zone out. Manual labor generally means issues with injuries, age, and low pay. But I have had plenty of much worse office jobs.

Personally my all time worst jobs was nothing to do for 3 months at a stretch while sitting on a client site so I couldn’t simply read a book.

Exactly. When you do this sort of work, your mind can wander. Compare to programming where you can't get anywhere if your mind wanders.

Of course it's hard on your body and it pays a lot worse.

I didn’t find that to be the case at all. In the beginning it was ok but once the days and shifts start to blend into a large unmemorable mess of tedium my mental state very quickly made me find other lines of work. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m wasting my time away as some kind of a almost literal cog.

Some manual labor you actually produce somewhat unique things in the end but some you just do the same thing every day and nothing ever changes or matters in any way.

The balance is key.

Personally, I cannot sit at a desk and be productive for more then 2-3 hours a day. It's just how it is, I'm a physical person.

If I go for a ride, do some physical labor, then sit down at about 3-6pm, I actually get quite a lot of work done in those 3 hours so long as I've planned my day accordingly.

To the parent, I honestly felt like you did for a long time, but I've realized that I had just worked too much, I was over a threshold and the only way out of it was to take some time off, regain some personal time.

Once I felt a bit better, I started to plan my days (around working 3 hours) and committed to the minimum I could at work, even gave up responsibilities which meant I had less bureaucracy to deal with. I still do have a few days a week with some crazy meetings but I just count those into my 3 hours.

Sorry if this isn't a luxury you can afford and therefore it's bad advice, but I actually didn't think it would be possible either, but I did some how manage to work it so far.

Also, huge cost to your body. Every relative I know who is was the trades, now has issues all the time directly attributable to their work. Their body has aged x2 compared to mine.

Most manual labor has you doing a handful of quite repetitive moves over and over and over until something breaks and you retire on disability.

Some people seem to think it’s like going to the gym or something smh

There is a whole lot of kids here with romanticized ideas of what physical labor is.

My dad is a contractor and every summer through college I’d go work for him as a low-skilled laborer.

I hated it at the time - all these years later I’m grateful because a) it taught me a lot of useful handyman stuff and b) I have no illusions of how great it is to “work with your hands” or outside everyday.

No one I worked with ever wished their job for their kids and everyone said how lucky I was to get to go to college.

This!!

On the flip side of this many actually do prefer their manual labor jobs. My father in law and brother in law both run their own contracting businesses (one does concrete, the other builds Med Expresses) and their workers and themselves have both said they would never want a desk job and don't know how I stare at a computer all day long.

It's kind of weird. I've worked both physical jobs and desk jobs, and could never imagine actually wishing a computer/desk job on either of my kids (thankfully they're not at all interested so far, so I think they've dodged a bullet). Interestingly, I have a good friend that was a bed-side nurse since she was 16 all the way through 36, at which point, she switched to a nurse manager position basically being behind the computer all day. This woman has worked a 12 hour shift most of her life, standing or walking, and lifting during the vast majority of that shift, yet couldn't understand why her back, hips, wrists and knees were killing her after 8 hours of sitting at a computer (not to mention her weight gain).

I recently started my first pure computer-at-desk gig. I've worked in labs that were 70% code 30% hands-on for the past ten years. I really miss it. That last 30% of pure, windowless, blinkless, coding has put a hefty mental burden on me.

It's far from the biggest tragedy in modern society, but I have learned something valuable when looking for future work.

Citation or explanation of “most”? And was that the case pre-industrial revolution?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com