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Comment by aledevv | Hacker News Reader

> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years.

I particularly agree with this statement.

I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so.

As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.

Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.

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I don't think it's that deep: Obligatory manual labor destroys the body (and, often, the mind) and what time you have you spend exhausted. Being entirely sedentary remains a choice for us office workers—this is why people exercise and spend time outside.

Of course, I would like more flexibility in choosing how much I and where I do my sedentary labor, so I might devote time to, say, gardening. But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.

I have worked subsistence farming for a small portion of my life, and I cannot tell you how hard it is, physically and psychologically. That was by choice, as part of essentially joining my wife's culture and family. If I were to do that for the remainder of my life it would destroy me.

Anyway, I'm going to go happily work from my desk 30 ft from my bedroom while drinking coffee likely farmed for about ~$0.30/hour while I make a few hundred times that.

> But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.

Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?

But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.

History certainly does not predate sedentary farming. It seems reasonable to put at around ~8kya.

Certainly, some people still live as hunter gatherers. I presume people can deduce I do not refer to them.

I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.

History is a bit of a confusing word that way; I suppose I can see it can be used in an informal sense to refer to any timeline outside of just historiography, which does tend to refer to a distinct study from archaeology and anthropology. Noted.

You used the word correctly don't worry. Seems like the initial replyer meant prehistory.

History is recorded, that's the definition of the word. Prehistory is not recorded which is what the 500 kya to 10 kya refers to.

The wikipedia for "Recorded history"[1] draws the distinction this way:

- Before writing: prehistory

- After writing: recorded history

- Both together: human history[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history

History means the time of recorded events, the 10 kya to present day, they used the word correctly. Anatomically modern humans are prehistory.

It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family / lifestyle with manual labor. Opting into working out for the sake of my health is not nearly the same.

>It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family / lifestyle

Success and failure are choices. Accepting this allows us to take responsibility for the worlds we've created. Ignoring this is self-destructive act of cognitive dissonance and we pay for it years later.

> Success and failure are choices.

Tell that to crop failures of sustinance farmers. "Oh you just chose the weather to be bad/a fast soreading disease/a severe drought. Live with your choices".

The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.

You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).

I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc.

Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.

@sdevonoes What do you do for work?

ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.

Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition.

You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.

They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.

A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.

@teruakohatu Some example of manual labor well payed in your country? In Italy, sometime manual labors are more safe than others not manual jobs.

This is because often the rules and laws protects still human instead the profits.

You don't have to @ their name here on HN, it doesn't work like Twitter. When you reply to them they'll see it already.

Only if they go back through their threads.

Or they use something like https://www.hnreplies.com/ which many do. In any case the @ doesn't work regardless, it does not ping anyone.

Forestry is well paid in NZ, the average forester is probably better paid than the average developer. Although the ceiling for software devs is much higher.

But Forestry also has the highest number of industrial accidents.

We have a strong health and safety regime and culture. Most primary industries are heavily automated. Yet it only takes a simple mistake to cause injury.

Is this New Zealand? Don't all the software people migrate to Australia for better wages?

Many do go overseas. They would definitely get paid more in Australia. But New Zealand is a pleasant place to live.

You don't want manual labor that you unfortunately cannot do due to being "chained to the modern life".

You want a modern life with some light manual labor on the side as a hobby.

> I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century.

As a farmer, it is funny to see how people react to you based on the current profitability winds. When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king. When times are tough, they think you're a slack-jawed yokel.

I expect in that lies the answer to your question: We denigrate anything that isn't, as a rule, making a lot of money. Manual jobs generally haven't made much money in the last century, and humorously the exceptions, like professional athlete, get exempted from being considered manual work.

> When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king.

While I'm not a farmer, from my experience they still call you a yokel when it's profitable.

Well, yeah, they'd call me a yokel. They'd also call me that when I'm at my tech job. But not the farmers they see getting rich and wish they were.

AI might shake things up, but I wonder if instead of "going back," it'll just blur the lines

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