Incidence rates (per 100 full-time worker equivalents) of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses by industry and case types, cases with days away from work, 2019 [0]

Fishing? 3.0 Bituminous coal underground mining? 3.0

Framing contractors? 4.5 Soft drink manufacturing? 4.8

Leather and hide tanning and finishing? 7.1

Computer systems design and related services? 0.1

Fatal injury rates fall along the same lines [1], and programmers commit suicide at less than 1/2 the rate of high risk occupations [2].

There's a difference between going home mentally exhausted, and being unable to go into work because your body is that injured.

Or to put it another way: if you were offered your equivalent salary, would you go fish Alaskan king crab or join a logging crew tomorrow?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/summ1_00.htm (Table 1) https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/case/cd_r4_2019.htm (Table R4)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0332.htm (Table A-5, Fatal incident counts by occupation) https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju... (Occupations with the highest rates)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6903a1-H.pdf (Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation, 2016)

I don't know that "hard-working" has generally been used to mean "working at hard physical labor". I have not been hard-working in that sense since the age of about twenty, the occasional home or volunteer project excepted.

Having said that, would you settle for "diligent"?

I struggle to find a term that allows for an equality between what I do on a daily basis, and what a fisherman does. Somehow, 'different but equal in effort' just doesn't seem accurate.

Which isn't to say that we aren't putting in work, or doing our best, or burning the candle, or creating amazing things.

You can do all of those things, and still not have as difficult a job as someone else. Because all work isn't the same.

And so I take a chunk of umbrage at whinging about the unfairness that we make so little while doing so much. "... struggle through and at best maybe make a decent living..." is a pretty damned entitled way to see the world.

Difficulty of a job is probably viewed differently from person to person also. I've done both programming and commercial fishing and I'd say they take different types of effort. Depending on the fishery, you could have a few months with lots of intense physical work and not much sleep, but the plus side is you get to work out on the ocean in a beautiful environment and you can travel around and not work for the rest of the year. One tech job I had, I was on call 24/7 with hours of commuting each day and it was very stressful and mentally tiring in my experience.

Hard-working (i.e. working hard) does not exclusively mean "working at hard physical labor". You are not insane.

It is a logical fallacy known as Relative Privation: https://academy4sc.org/video/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...