[jug6ernaut]

I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning.

IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.

And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.

[shkkmo]

Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work.

The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.

[JoeAltmaier]

It is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.

[waterlesscloud]

Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.

[padobson]

Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."

[saalweachter]

Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "This building is full of houses."

[tedks]

Home Depot existed long before software.

It'll exist long after software, too.

Remember that we live in a bubble.

[oldmanjay]

There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.

[jessaustin]

Yeah I suspect "after human civilization" will happen sooner than "after software".

[tedks]

This is the sort of arrogance that creates and bursts bubbles.

I hope you can learn to live sustainably and in harmony with nature and your own soul before it's too late.

[corin_]

Purely for the sake of pedantry, Home Depot is actually under 40 years old, so it didn't even exist before software, yet alone after.

[JoeAltmaier]

Not a lot of businesses had more than a mechanical calculator in 1975

[Shorel]

I don't see software going away anytime soon.

It's like expecting writing and/or books to go away three thousand years ago.

[retrogradeMT]

This is why started to build web projects on the side. I have one these white collar jobs and I don't get to create things. I work closely with construction workers and get to see how satisfying it is for them to build something real.

Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.

[duaneb]

> I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun

To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.