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by johndotsun 3316 days ago
Before attending college I worked at walmart for several months, and I also spent a few months working construction. You do not want to work in either of those environments.

You're a person with intelligence, agency, and presumably the strong drive to succeed at various goals that motivated you to start your company in the first place. Your skill set and ability to learn new skills is such that you are useful for more tasks than stacking shelves, pushing carts, or hauling and shaping re-bar.

By and large the people I met at walmart were, to say it bluntly, not very smart and were consequently aggravating to interact with because of this. There are people in this life who struggle to reach full competency at stocking shelves, dusting, pushing carts, or other menial retail oriented tasks despite an earnest effort from them. A work environment like walmart is structured to run a billion dollar business using these people, and to do this their workers are subjected to a system that at times seem arbitrary and overly restrictive but ultimately necessary given their labor pool. So not only will you be inside of that system, but you will be required to find ways to work with coworkers who have managed to reach levels of incompetence that you wouldn't otherwise think was possible had you not seen it with your own eyes. This is not to say that there are no intelligent people working in the various walmart stores, and I did meet some during my tenure. However those people were few and far between, and were usually there due to unfortunate life circumstances beyond their control.

General labor construction work involves working with the same people, but without the strict and arbitrary system. This is replaced with coworkers that show up drunk and high starting as early as 7 AM and while this isn't a problem in some work environments, in a work environment involving power tools and heavy equipment this can be life threatening not just for them but for you as well. If you choose to train in a specialty such as electrical or other, you'll be fairly well separated from these people but then considering the amount of effort you have to go to in order to get these jobs you might as well just use the skillset you have in programming. You'll get payed more and you won't be working in environments with toxic dust, ambient noise levels capable of causing permanent hearing loss, and repetitive physical movement that slowly destroys your mobility so that in your old age you're completely sedentary (my electrician grandfather can no longer lift his arms above level despite several attempted corrective surgeries)

I don't know what the solution to your problem is but I do know that working in a grocery store or basic construction is not the correct course of action if you desire to reduce the amount of stress in your life.