"Exhausting work," lol.
The only people who say nonsense like this are the people who've never done manual labor for a living. I've done both and there's just no comparison of exhaustion levels.
I've also done both and each can leave me profoundly exhausted in very different ways. Neither flavor of exhaustion is worse than the other, just different.
When someone compares programing to manual labor implying that programming is more tiring or at least as tiring, yes, absolutely, 100%, it's incredibly difficult for me to respond with empathy. Impossible, even. It's clear that person has had an incredibly sheltered life.
Thanks for asking? I guess???
I live on a horse farm. My day starts and ends with heavy manual labor working around animals that can kill me in an instant if they're in a bad mood or I have the misfortune to get in the middle of a beef between two of them. Most of yesterday, the temperature was in the single digits Fahrenheit with wind gusts to 50mph.
I'm also a programmer. There are some days I couldn't tell you which of the two jobs is the more exhausting.