[brandonmenc]

I love to exercise - but I really like being able to keep that separate from other aspects of my life.

I've worked manual labor jobs. They suck, and they damage your body. If you think sitting all day long is bad for your health, imagine what even just pushing a broom thousands of times a day is doing to say, your rotator cuff.

Pack a healthy lunch, keep your hours reasonable, get up from your desk and walk around every couple hours, exercise in your free time, and your office job won't kill you.

As to which type of job is more "fun" - a construction foreman once told me that he always sees these guys who try working construction to get away from their office job, who try to find meaning/enlightenment through manual labor - a sentiment you hear here a lot - and they always go back to their office job. Always.

But the guys who manage to escape the jobsite for the office - they never, ever come back.

[csallen]

I'm a software engineer, but I worked a construction job once while I was young. I barely lasted a week.

The job was to help with building a hotel during a sweltering hot summer in Georgia. I'd be soaked in sweat before noon. We spent all day carrying heavy pieces of drywall up and down rickety staircases that somehow never collapsed, injuring our fingers, stepping on rusty nails, walking through rooms full of brightly colored dust and gas with no masks on, etc. I felt like I'd cut into my lifespan after just a few days. My whole body hurt by the time I got home, and I was so exhausted I couldn't do anything else.

Construction work can be simple, sure. But it's not easy.

[your-nanny]

I get irritated by people who complain when they see construction workers (or similar) standing around. They underestimate just how hard their work is on their bodies

[perl4ever]

I am trying to exercise regularly in a gym, and I am finding that joint discomfort/pain is the limiting factor. When you're in your 20s or even your 30s, you don't generally think about that.

But enough IT types talk about RSI problems, wrists and such, that it ought to be on the radar screen if you are considering a physical job.

An uncle of mine had a physical job in a hospital most of his life and suffered from spinal stenosis, which I believe caused incredible pain in his retirement.

My mother was a computer programmer, but the whole reason she got a college degree was because she studied like mad in high school, because she was driven by escaping manual labor on the family farm. None of her siblings became farmers.

[RaceWon]

I had an orthopedic surgeon from the HSS (He taught Anatomy and Orthopedic Surgery at NYU) once, who told me to Always use your body even when if it hurts to do so because of an injury.

3 years ago I had a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic, which affected the nerves in my dominant arm. This was painful to the point of waking me up from sleep and my arm was almost useless in certain ranges of motion. Prior to this I had neglected working out for about 5 years, but started again; it took about a year but my arm is back to normal now and I can do more consecutive pushups than my age... and I'm 58.

Ignore the pain and workout.

[justinator]

I'm generally for the idea of staying active, to promote healing with prescribed movement and 30 hours/week of physicsl activity isn't unheard of in my life -

but I'm not sure "always" is the right answer ... always.

I do agree that a lack of physical exercise can cause its own type of pain that counterintuitively can be relieved with movement, or the best thing after a long run is a brisk jog the next day, but if I severly sprain an ankle, maybe it's best to just rest that ankle for a while.

[specialist]

I know you're right. I have chronic pain (from GVHD). I almost always do better after exercise, activity. But getting started is very hard.

What helps me is having someone, anyone around, to distract me from myself.

[reitanqild]

> As to which type of job is more "fun" - a construction foreman once told me that he always sees these guys who try working construction to get away from their office job, who try to find meaning/enlightenment through manual labor - a sentiment you hear here a lot - and they always go back to their office job. Always.

Believe you. I've been wet an got electrical shocks from wet equipment more than once on a particular site.

But part of it is probably also that office jobs typically pays better and people find it hard to return to a lower salary.

What I liked best was when I had my own office but lots of trips to install, maintain, upgrade and verify the systems I programmed ;-)

[gadders]

I worked as a building site labourer and removal man in my summer holidays as a student. I think it's OK when you're younger, but I wouldn't want to be doing it at 50+.

When I was a removal man, one guy had to come back to work earlier than recommended after open heart surgery as they only got the UK statutory sick pay which was fuck all. We were taking a sofa out of a building over a first floor balcony when the sofa slipped and banged him right in the sternum. I can still remember the scream of pain he made :-(

[j9461701]

And yet construction workers were the happiest group surveyed:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/construction-workers-topped-r...

Personally, I really couldn't agree more with what you're saying. The prospect of doing manual labor for a living just sounds awful. Getting dirty and smelly, blowing out my knees and ruining my back, having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day, massively increasing my probability of suffering a crippling or fatal work-related accident. And an office job has the possibility of leading to a work-from-home situation, which would allow you to get whatever level of exercise of whatever type you want every single day of the week.

[visarga]

> having my brain stuck in idle for 8 hours all day every day

You'd be surprised how many times manual labor requires solution finding. Even figuring out a leaking pipe or a problem in the electricity panel requires ingenuity. Designing and making custom furniture can be complex. A competent construction worker / repairman can be like a dev and payed like one (& sometimes harder to find). Take a look at those DIY videos to see what I mean. Not to mention the tooling these guys have in their shops ...

[wufufufu]

Yea, the opinion that you can only use your brain in an office job is wrong, but that opinion is somehow is imprinted on everyone.

I know people who work(ed) construction who are actually very smart and they constantly belittle their own intelligence because they don't have a college degree or have a job that works with computers. Vice versa I know people who attend graduate school at tech institutes who are actually stupid in many ways but are so full of themselves because they've managed to memorize enough to pass engineering classes.

[TheCoelacanth]

Construction industry, not necessarily the people actually doing the construction. That is easily explained by the relatively good economic performance of the construction industry at the time the survey was conducted.

[watwut]

Injured and sick get out of manual labor, oftentimes in pain. Developers whose back hurts or joints are bad continue working slightly less happy. Worker whose back or joints hurt gotta find new job.

[fjsolwmv]

And guess what group was #2: Software developers. Now look at long-term health and economic prospects of the two careers, beyod short term satisfaction with survivorship bias. Former developers are better off than former construction workers.

[j9461701]

Actually #2 was consumer products and services. Technology in general and software ranked 3rd.

>Now look at long-term health and economic prospects of the two careers, beyod short term satisfaction with survivorship bias.

Economics seems to be the real reason the original poster saw people switch away from manual labor after trying it for a while. Construction workers may be happier and more fulfilled day to day, but software engineers are paid more and it's hard to say no to a larger, more consistent paycheck.

[lookACamel]

Did he account for differences in salary?