Both can be awful.

Just because physical labour is physically tiring, it does not follow that mental labour might not be even more stressful.

I worked farm labour in my 20s and those were some of the best jobs I ever had.

Every meal was a banquet and I slept like a log. Potatoes tasted so good, it was as if I was eating ambrosia.

I also believe that the body and the mind need to be worked together.

The disembodied work typically done in offices is unbalanced, and can be very taxing.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch

When you live an easier life than 99% of humans, that's worth being grateful for.

Interestingly given the context of this thread, I think the attitude of always needing to be angry, always focusing on negatives, always demanding more, always blaming others and obsessing over grand injustices can itself tip some people into mental illness.

It's a memeplex thing, though. Constant rage at injustice is a great way for a memeplex to turn people into highly-motivated ideological soldiers. It's a technique used by demagogues from Stalin to Hitler to Castro and Kim, and which you see today as well. But the need to always emphasize that rage and injustice and resentment can definitely push some people over the edge. Gratefulness is a good antidote, in proportion with a balanced and contextualized understanding of the problems of the world.

Absolutely, and social media only amplifies these “oppression Olympics”.

There is nothing "easier" in feeling unhappy or angry. Mental illness is widespread across billionaires despite their wealth. It's also well known that mental illness is less common in traditional, less developed societies.

> ... I think the attitude of always needing to be angry ... can itself tip some people into mental illness.

No. People cannot artificially create mental illness in themselves by simply thinking "negatively". There is no simple self-destruct button in our mind: people need to go through (untreated) trauma, pressure, abuse from external sources or diseases or serious genetic conditions.

Here's a wiki on it. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

It's one of the purest most common logical fallacies used.

There is plenty of historical evidence that shows otherwise.

In most subsistence societies people, including farmers, worked far less than now and with less pressure, lived in a more social environment and had a lot of holidays (especially in the middle ages).

Not that it matters too much, but a holiday in the Middle Ages didn't mean the peasants didn't work, it just meant that they didn't eat meat. Otherwise it was work sun-up to sun-down 6 days a week for barely enough food to keep your family alive - that is provided there was not a harvest failure two years in a row.

You are more than welcome to start your own business with a more relaxed environment, but don’t be surprised when a company with a lower work/life balance puts you out of business.

That's why we're in this mess. We see these things as inevitabilities.

You know what that means? We don't control them. So we're going to create a bad situation for ourselves because businesses cannot pull out of a basic game theoretical problem? You think this is OK and not worth looking at? What is even your endgame here?

I don't have a good solution given the current economic system.

This quote from your earlier comment comes after you finish "describing the problem".

Taken together, the rhetorical effect is an expression of fatalism. Your formulation accepts the currently destructive state of affairs. It's disingenuous to say "all I am doing is describing the system".

You're describing the system and then subtly suggesting any attempt to improve matters is folly.

EDIT: Fix number agreement in first sentence.

[0]: https://www.deutsche-depressionshilfe.de/depression-infos-un...