You're confounding affluence with the difference between physical/mental labour. I've done both hard physical labour and hard mental labour, and what OP says is totally spot on. Hard physical work, even when excruciatingly tough, is most often more bearable than hard mental work. There's nothing like beig 'done' after a hard day of work. After a hard day of mental work you just feel miserable until you fall asleep. If only manual laborers were appreciated (i.e. compensated) as much as mental laborers...

My significant other does manual labor, and it's a good day when they don't want to just come home and fall asleep on the couch and those good days are rare. Even after my worst days of a software dev job, I still have the energy to come home and cook dinner, do some yard work, and other chores.

I will echo your line about wishing manual laborers were better appreciated. I have impostor syndrome, but it's not in comparison to peers in my industry, it's feeling like I don't deserve to earn multiples more then people like my spouse who break their bodies for a pittance.

well, yes, unless after hard day of work, you have more work waiting or, you go to bed worrying if weather will kill your crops, or will you be able to sell them, etc. Farming in particular is much more like running a startup, then it is like office work, where the risk of running business is someone else's problem, and you get your salary at the end of the month no matter what.

> Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to do as less as possible with the maintenance of their tools. And after work everyone stressed because they are afraid that this year benefits might end up not covering expenses and not knowing what to do if the price of milk drops again and your 11 year daughter does not understand why all family can't go to Disneyland during the tourist season like her friends do.

Sure we all worry, but that wasn't what I meant to say. I mean on the actual work day, almost everything is predictable or it has known responses. Today you have to plow the field, remove weeds, prepare seeds, milk the cows, etc. While on a mental job you get thrown literally anything at you and you're supposed to solve the problem.

Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails? What if I get old and can't get a job anymore? What if the tech I'm working gets obsolete? What if I get replaced by a cheaper alternative so the bottom line grows?

> Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling.

Maybe I should've mentioned it but I got this from talking to friends and others that have physical jobs. It's not a study, but definitely not just a gut feeling.

> Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails?

This cannot be serious. I've worked at startups, and the answer is: there are 50 other companies within 10 blocks who are falling over themselves to hire programmers, especially one with the gumption to try a startup. I've never heard of anyone who worked at a tech startup who then had trouble finding other employment after it failed.

If your biggest "worry" at work is that you might not become a millionaire and may have to fall back on a $150K/yr job, I really don't know how to respond, because that is nothing at all like the worries faced by people working in labor.

You're being pretty quick to judge here.

I've never worked on a startup and have no intention to do it. I live in a poor country where the average developer earns $8k/year and very few of us have any fallback. Mentioning startups was a way to relate to people here on HN.

If you don't focus on the specifics I bet you can come up with examples that relate to you and my argument still stands. Everyone has a different worry. Putting one's worries on a pedestal and discarding everyone else's as "not as bad" is pretty shallow to me.

Even when everything appears to be repetitive it is never repetitive. You should just try a work holiday visa on a country where you want to learn a language and work at a farm. It still won’t reflect all the stress that means just changing one provider, investing in new technology from all those companies that want to make profit on you for and never be sure on whether this year you are really not going to make it anymore, knowing you are already at the bottom of the chain (primary sector) and you start considering closing everything right before getting into bankruptcy. And your friends still believe you are ok because “you work in the nature” and if you are an owner you are very likely to get the whole year salary at once and they cannot understand why being cheap is just a way of survive.