Anybody notice how hard physical labor is?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m in really good shape.

Today I built a set of five steps, two retaining walls, and set about a dozen pavers.

I went to Lowes, and bought nine bags of concrete, cinder blocks, pavers, and junk.

I loaded it. Took it home. Unloaded it.

I measured my slope, dug it out, fit everything loosely, and then cemented it in place. I started at 9:00 finished at 5:00.

I probably would have finished about 2:00, but I figure I spent about 3 hours, going “Holy shit! This is hard work!”

I consider myself a tough guy (I just typed “I fancy myself a tough guy,” but then I realized tough guys don’t “fancy” things, so I changed it,) but this job wiped me out and made me its bitch.

My back hurts, my neck hurts, my legs hurt. I got a blister in my palm. The skin on my hands is cracked and wrinkled and feels hot and sore.

And yet, I really didn’t do shit.

Back in ye olden days, caveman pioneer types would probably do what amounts to 10 times this amount of work just to subsist. They had no medical care, and did it in spite of walking around with a lifetime worth of injuries, scurvy, brucellosis, pulled ligaments, badly healed breaks, head lice, fleas, tapeworms, running sores, bad teeth, ruptured disks, herniated thingamadoobies, and just about anything else you can imagine.

It’s not like I built the pyramids or anything.

Indeed, most of the time I watch other people work, or work physically at hard labor with other people, I note that about 85-90% of the time is spent either recovering from the last effort, or assaying the next one.

It’s like the days I burnt the pile of logs. Only a very small percentage of the time was spent actually hauling a log. The rest of the time I stood panting and thinking “Goddamn that log was heavy,” “That log also looks heavy,” or “Damn, all these logs look heavy.”

And the dirt, and the sweat, and the strain.

It’s like work. Damn. Most of the time, I figure we have machines that do all the actual work for us. We call it work when we’re operating the machine, but it’s really not. It’s watching the machine work.

I remember how tired I get from the strain of operating my heavy chainsaw. It’s heavy and awkward, and it seems like a lot of work.

I remember my old barn. Every piece of wood in that thing was hand hewn.

They didn’t have chainsaws, they had saws or axes. If they needed a square beam, they started with a tree. Cut the tree down with an axe. Lop the branches off. Start at one end with an axe and chop down along the length to get a flat edge. Rotate the tree, and do it again. Rotate the tree and do it again. Rotate the tree and do it again. Now you have a square beam.

If I need a square beam I go to Lowes and get one. I call it work to put them together with nails and bolts driven by power tools.

How many hours of backbreaking manual labor did those guys who made my barn invest to get a single beam? There are hundreds of beams in that barn. All of them are joined by hand with tabs and slots and dowels. What do they call it? Toungue and grovve?

How many hours pounding away with chisels for each joint?

When they dug the foundation for that barn they didn’t have bulldozers or skid loaders. They had shovels. And they carried all those rocks by hand. I know the year that barn was built. It’s carved into a stone. 1846.

It’ still there, and as solid as ever. Do we build like that today?

That guy that did that was a colossal badass of strength ingenuity, and determination. He probably didn’t think anything of it. He needed a barn, so he built one.

Five steps, and two smallish retaining walls made from storebought prefab materials wiped me out. Wiped me out bad.

I am considered a strong man, a good worker. By today’s standards. What a pussy I am, compared to the men of the past.

Have we lost our ability to work?

2

God Bless the Industrial Revolution.

3

To answer your question, no, Scylla, we just work differently. Modern life has it’s own toll and stresses that our forebears couldn’t understand, so it all averages out.

4

Actually I think we’re just whiny bitches and our forbears would laugh at our coddled existance and what we call stress.

Can’t you just picture explaining the stresses of today to your great great great great great great great grandfather?

You: “You see, I 'm all stressed out from trying to figure out this tax form, and then the traffic was horrible coming home.”

Forbear: “Wow, that does sound tough.”

You: “I bet you’re glad you don’t have to deal with that. You probably wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of modern living.”

Forbear: “Yes. I can see why your stressed out over the dire consequences of traffic jams and tax forms. Lucky for me, my problems were only a daily confrontation between life and death in an environment of constant misery that never ended. Thank God I don’t have to worry about health care insurance. If I get sick I’ll just die stress free.”

5

Scylla… your body adapts to what you use it for, within the limits of its ability. If you had grown up working like a pioneer, you’d think nothing of it.

I agree with you, though, that our modern society favors (or at least, doesn’t penalize) weakness.

Long ago, the successful man was generally the one who could work hard. He made a good living, attracted women, and passed his genes along. The man who couldn’t… didn’t.

Now, the man who sits in an office all day makes the good living, attracts the women, and passes his genes along. He has no pressing reason to develop his work capacity, and the women have no reason to be selective about it.

I’ve met a lot of people who were amazed that their “pretty boy” gym workouts had NO bearing on their hard work capacity. It’s NOT the same thing.

6

Who’s we, Scylla? :wink:

:::d&r:::

7

Being in good shape, as you said you were, proly means being able to rollerblade 10 miles? Hike 20?

If you had the callouses on your hands from actual work, the blister wouldn’t be there. Working a trade gives you much more endurance. Can’t be had from going to a gym

8

My first job. Summer of 1985 or so, I’m about 13. I’m working construction at my parents’ job sites in and around Atlanta. I’m doing the non-skilled stuff: foundation mapping, electrician’s helper, carpenter’s helper, general cleanup, etc. It is astonshingly hot, every freaking day, and I’m doing this six days a week.

And every day, as we’re heading home from the work site, I’d sit in the back seat of our Oldsmobile station wagon, covered in mud and sawdust and sweat and dirt, more exhausted than I’d ever been. I’d be exhausted to the point that I didn’t want to do anything with my friends, didn’t want to watch TV; I just wanted to eat, shower, and sleep, in that order. I’d roll the window down and feel the breeze and I’d look at the scenery passing, and I’d think one thought, over and over:

I swear on everything I love that I’m going to college.

9

Cave Dude spent zip time making sure that his 1040 jived with his K-1s.

10

It’s like being out of shape. If you haven’t run for a while, the first time around, maybe running two blocks will most likely make you tired as hell, and could even be dangerous if you havn’t done it in a long time. Take it slow and the more you do it, the less tired you’ll be and you could be running 5 miles every other day like it’s no big deal.

I know some guys that all they do is work with tools, concrete and construction. It’s not hard for them at all because physically, they’ve been doing it for quite some time and their body is used to it. Take your average paper pusher and stick him in concrete for a year. You’ll be one robust mo fo when it comes time to poor a couple of measily bags of morter for a deck post.

11

Well sure you will, 'cause you’ll be cast stone… :smiley: (couldn’t resist)

I started out in life doing all manner of manual labor jobs. During those years, I was in the best shape of my life - or at least would have been if part of the thing of hangin’ with my landscaper / carpenter / plumber / electrician / laborer friends wasn’t going out every day for a triple burger at lunch and every evening for beers and burgers at the local bar. You worked it all off, but how much healthier we all would have been if we had been eating right AND doing the hard work.

You’d get laughed off the job if you pulled a chicken breast and a light salad out of your lunchpail back then though …

We haven’t lost our ability to work. We just DON’T work anymore. If civilzation were to collapse tomorrow, we’d all do what needed to be done to get by and most of us would do just fine after the first few months of “oh my God, how am I going to do this?”

12

My father-in-law is 73. He and my mother-in-law have built several houses. The first one, right after they married, had a hand-dug basement. In fact, right after they dug it, a bad rainstorm came thru and they had to dig it again. (they’ve related that story a few times.) Eighteen years ago, they built a house here in Florida. Ten years ago, they built a house in the mountains of North Caroline. Two years ago, they decided to slow down. They had the shell of their house built, but they finished the inside - laying and finishing the hardwood floor, building, staining and installing all their cabinetry, milling, finishing, and installing all the wood trim, building a storage shed in the yard.

Even tho he worked for years in an office, FIL has always had projects going - physically challenging projects. I saw him up a tree with a chain saw in one hand lopping branches off an adjacent tree. I’ve watched him set roof trusses and lay block and sand for hours.

He recently had a stress test done. They wanted him to get his heart rate over 160. He couldn’t do it - his heart’s too strong. He’s an amazing man.

13

Physical labor is hard - harder when you’re not used to it of course, but hard enough on you, over time, when you do it every day. I’m quite glad I work at a desk with a computer terminal, and exercise when I want to.

I remember back in the 1960s and early 1970s, many of my compatriots wanted to do some sort of outdoorsy work, rather than work in an office, shut off from nature. I shared that sentiment back then. Boy howdy, was I nuts. :slight_smile:

14

Hey Scylla, we could use some work done around here… Are you for hire? :smiley:

15

Well, I think the pioneers thought something of it, alright. They just didn’t have a choice in the matter.

One good story is Roughing It In the Bush, by Susannah Moodie. These were English immigrants who had to carve a life out of the bush near Peterborough, Ontario in 1830-something.

Mentioned in the book is all the usual deprivations, tragedies, grinding loneliness, chronic pain, injury, backbreaking labour, blah, etc. The swarms of biting bugs in spring & summer when they were trying to build, farm, and garden. Everything seemed to be a major production involving physical labour, even simply trying to have a bath or do laundry. Never mind the difficulties & travails of winter, loss of harvests, human frailty & cruelty and so on.

They knew damn well that they had a hard life.

One read of a book like this will tell you that we are mostly spoiled, pale, pencil-necked whiners compared to the pioneers. Or even compared to many people in third world countries today.

I personally have no wish to work that hard. We have a large bush property not far from where the Moodies settled so long ago. We like to think we work our asses off on the place but we know it’s nothing compared to what they had. We do lack the modern convenience of hydro but the similarity ends about there.

It’s true that if we had no choice, we’d be working like that, too. But I doubt we’d be thinking nothing of it.

16

A few decades back, shortly after getting out of college and ending up in really crappy jobs, I decided I’d had it with these girl jobs and got a job as a telephone installer.

As physical jobs go it wasn’t that bad. In those days most of the job was done inside the house. For all you young’uns, the phone co. used to own all the equipment and instead of little plugs there were wires at the ends of the phones that needed to be connected. But still, three or four times a week I had to climb a pole, sometimes even twice in one day (usually, if I had to go up one, I had to go up two or more). There was duck-walking through crawl spaces. Every day, getting the ladder off the truck, carrying it somewhere, setting it up, climbing it, doing the job, then putting it back on the truck. Plus, of course, getting into and out of the truck around 30 times a day.

The first couple of weeks I was so whipped I thought I would cry. Around noon I would skip the step of taking off my tool belt when getting back into the truck because it seemed like a needless expenditure of energy, even though we weren’t supposed to drive while wearing the tool belt and it was awkward.
Every muscle in my body hurt except my bike-riding muscles (I rode a bicycle everywhere in those days, usually as fast as possible.)

I’ve had insomnia all my life . . . those first few weeks I would get home, shower (or maybe even not), eat (or maybe not), and fall asleep by, like, 8 pm. After a few weeks things got much better. Of course I got more efficient at the job itself. In time I could get off work, get home, change and go play a couple of sets of tennis. On my days off, which were hardly ever consecutive and rarely weekends, I would be itchy to go hiking or rock climbing.

After a year at this job there was a force reduction (i.e., layoff), the phone co. changed to those neat little jacks so people could mostly do the inside work themselves, assuming the place was wired, and I got shifted to an “inside” job–one of those girl jobs I’d been trying to avoid in the first place, and I thought I was going to lose my mind. People worked so slowly, and it was mostly sitting. Pay much lower also, so I quit, but I never had another job like that again and boy, did I miss it.

The really funny thing was that one day I went to a very large house–one with “staff.” One of the staff members was a woman who was first down on her hands and knees scrubbing a floor, then dragging a ladder around to wash all the windows top to bottom and then, as I was leaving, down on her knees scrubbing again. She said: “When you’re my age, you’re gonna be sorry you had such a hard job!” Compared to hers, I thought my job was easy! I am now about the age I suspect she was, and I’ll bet I’d look ten years younger if I’d actually had that “hard” job all those years.

Oddly enough, one of the bennies was a paid membership at the gym. Never used it.

17

Getting old’s a bitch, eh Scylla?

:wink:

18

Nah, if they had too many of these things, they’d be dead.
Come to think of it, I’d probably fare none too well in ye olden times, on account of my eyesight ain’t the greatest.

Hmm… is that a wolf or my pet dog? <snap>