The book The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road captures a lot of stories with feelings like the ones you described; romanticism that stems from on identifying heavily through their work. Here is one of those stories from the book [1]; I'd recommend people in this thread give it a read, it is worth knowing the lives of so many Americans before it is automated and stories like these disappear.

https://longreads.com/2017/09/21/a-high-end-mover-dishes-on-...