“Don’t break anything,” Jay, my supervisor, warned as I nervously took the handle of the rented industrial floor scrubber. Scuff marks and small dents covered it where it had impacted something on past jobs.
This thing has probably broken a lot of things, I thought to myself.
I pulled the start lever and the scrubber’s torque twisted my 18 year old body on the wet ivory hued ceramic tile. I fought to maintain my grip on the handle while the monstrous rotating hard-bristle brush began excavating filth from the pores of the tile floor at Lassen’s Natural Foods and Vitamins.
“Alright,” Jay called over the hum of the electric motor and the rhythmic scratching of bristles against tile, “I’ll be back in a bit to mop up.”
I focused on maintaining absolute control over the machine. I could vividly imagine every glass bottle of organic juice on the nearest shelf shattering on the floor, swept from their perch by an out-of-control scrubber handle. Or perhaps the delicate wax ear candles getting crushed to unrecognizable crumples. A good whack of the machine might overturn a couple of the two-foot square flats of wheatgrass, which seemed to already be precariously perched on a shelf next to the juicer.
The most daunting section of the store would be the canyon-like maze of aisles filled with thousands of bottles of vitamins. Not only would it be torturous to clean up innumerable little pills partially dissolved into the wetted tile mixed with razor sharp shards of glass, but the store would also suffer significant monetary loss due to their high cost — many at least $20, some more than $75 per bottle!
After a few minutes of white-knuckling the handle I found that the machine was actually fairly predictable; tipping the front up would send me spinning to my right, and if the back was raised, I’d be fighting to not pivot left. When the brush head was parallel with the tile, I managed to not involuntarily pirouette. This discovery gave my mind a task to distract me from the disastrous “what if” scenarios: focus on keeping the brush mostly flat against the tile, raising and lowering the handle just enough to tilt the machine to steer it in gentle side to side arcs across the floor.
“Hey, we gotta pick up the pace!” Jay had returned with a mop and partially filled bucket of clean water. “We’re usually done by 11:30. We should be done by midnight tonight, latest.”
By 12:05 I was headed home in my tan 1995 Ford Ranger 4×4, sweaty and exhausted from working a shift as a store clerk, and a (thankfully) uneventful extra half-shift as floor scrubber. While I drove I realized I was feeling something slightly peculiar: happy.
I finally sank into my family’s forest green L-shaped cloth couch for a few minutes before bed to join my parents who were watching Jay Leno interview his final guest of the evening on The Tonight Show. I assumed the source of my happiness was simply the chance to relax and be idle. But, a thought whacked into my late-teenage brain like my earlier imaginations of the floor scrubber careening into valuable products.
“I like physically working hard.” It surprised me enough that I said it out loud to my parents, always the night owls, who were sitting near me.
My attitude was one I think typical of most suburban teenage boys — often fond of lazing around when given the opportunity. I had yet to learn that, “somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness”, as ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazez puts it.1 The revelation that night made me unafraid of physical effort and strain.
Was the happiness I felt after the late night of hard work peculiar or abnormal like I initially thought?
As it turns out, no. What was happening was a predictable mix of biochemical and neurological processes you and I have built into our bodies. I say predictable because of the careful observations of those who have noticed there’s a connection between movement and well-being. Movement can enhance your mood for up to twelve hours.2 It doesn’t take wrestling an industrial floor scrubber for three hours to make a difference; movement as calm as yoga gives you mood boosting benefits, too.3 And making movement a regular practice will help your brain simply work better at solving the many, many problems you will face in life.4 When the problem you are currently facing is one of depression, anxiety, or panic, the medicine of movement can be a powerful intervention when used with psychotherapy or prescribed drugs.5
The complex systems in your body simply work better when you move your body. And a growing number of people are literally investing in their health by buying access to gyms and health clubs which offer opportunities for members to move and work their bodies. As of 2021 the gym and health club market in the U.S. is $33 billion, and globally approaching $100 billion.6
At the same time, manual (read physically active) professions are stigmatized as only suitable for those of low social position, or those who aren’t “smart” enough for college or for white collar office jobs. With the benefits of physical labor so abundant, why do we persist and even deepen the stigma of skilled manual labor? What’s the social caché of avoiding labor during our working hours and then paying for the privilege of sweating after work (or before)? Or is the stigma simply based on comparison of monetary income benefit — where those who work manual professions are perceived to be “lower wage” earners?
The stigma of the unintelligent skilled manual laborer is challenged by those who point out there are complex skills needed to effectively work manual labor jobs — skills such as contextual application (knowing the how and why of executing a manual task), situational awareness and interpersonal skills (spatial problem solving and deft communication), and innovation (creativity as each task is slightly different).7 Put another way, those who benefit from manual labor tasks don’t want them done by someone who is too incompetent or unintelligent, because they want the task done efficiently and correctly.
From a pure efficiency standpoint, wouldn’t it make sense to move your body while you work, so when you’re off work, you don’t need to spend additional time in a gym?8 That “additional time in the gym” is a significant factor in maintaining a consistent, long-term exercise program. Most gyms lose 50% of their new members within 6 months — indicating we find it hard to balance time or find motivation to be consistent in adding gym visits to our schedules long term.9 That 50% is in reference to canceled memberships, not to mention the memberships which are retained but unused as the gym member intends on returning to the gym “soon”.
My commitment to this viewpoint — to move my body while I work — was continually tested during a stint building palapas (tiki huts).10 I spent day-long work shifts on my feet moving lumber, measuring and cutting and drilling poles, and doing on-site installations in the piercing Southern California sun. At the end of every day I felt pride in the workmanship of my hands and mind, even while my body was in need of regeneration. I had created something beautiful and valuable from raw materials.
Of course, physical labor isn’t necessarily enjoyable, but this argument isn’t about joy per se. It is an argument for overall well being. An almost universal sentiment which every manual laborer has at some time or another is a longing for an “easy job”, with air conditioning and soft chairs. This sentiment is summed up well in the lyrics to the song in The Fiddler on the Roof. The main character, Tevye, sings in If I Were a Rich Man,
If I were a rich man
Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum
All day long, I’d biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work hard11
“You want me to take a turn?” my friend Phil asked with a bit of guilt in his eyes from letting me do the hard part of mixing the cement for his fence. We were pouring cement footings for Phil’s new steel pipe fence posts.
“Nah, I’m good,” I responded through grunts while straining against heavy shovelfuls of cement.
“You sure? Well, thanks man.”
“Needs a bit more water in the mix, please.”
Phil sprayed more water from the hose into the mix as I kept finding dry cement mix. When the dry mix was incorporated into the wet, we shoveled it into the hole around the steel post. After leveling the post, we leaned against the red brick side of his house and guzzled some ice water.
“This may seem strange to say, but I like hard physical work,” I confided.
“Me too, buddy,” came his response. “Sitting at the office all day is no bueno.”
Sitting at the office all day is no bueno, yet still I willingly bind myself to my desk every workday. How did my life come to revolve around a sturdy desk, aluminum laptop, and padded office chair? I can trace it back to my second job, which ironically was the palapa gig.
I was a grunt laborer with duties ranging from producing and packaging kits, loading and unloading on-site installation equipment and material on trucks, working installations on-site, and on lighter-work days, taking inventory of raw material and completed kits awaiting orders and shipping. There was a lot of sweating involved every day, but it was a good job.
One Friday afternoon I stepped inside the five foot by eight foot company office which was attached to the manufacturing workshop and convinced the owners to let me take a copy of the website source code home with me to see what, if any, updates I’d be able to manage over the weekend. This was probably quite unexpected from the owners’ viewpoint — I was just a shop-hand and now I’m asking for something completely out of my domain. For me it was a logical next step in my learning, as I had cultivated a keen interest in computers from the time I was elementary school aged. The following week I found a break in work and returned to the owners’ shop office and showed off my changes. From then on I found myself equally working in the office and the shop.
The following year I transferred from community college to a university out-of-state. I found choosing a major difficult. At first it was electrical engineering with the thought of working with my hands and mind to build devices (when I was a child I wanted to work for Disney as an animatronics engineer). As the coursework increased in difficulty, I struggled to see a path beyond a desk. And the work on the desk didn’t interest me. That coursework did require me to take a few computer science classes which I enjoyed, but as I pondered where to focus my major I shied away from pure computer science due to the thought of being stuck behind a computer, while sitting at a desk! Instead I pursued geography with an emphasis in geographic information systems. The thought was that geographers needed to go and see and measure — things that take someone away from a desk. But my aptitude in computer science eventually led me to a desk-bound programming job anyway.
The philosophy of Mr. Money Mustache12 (A.K.A. Pete Adeney) illustrates what can come from trading a corporate office desk for movement-based work. Setting aside the FIRE13 evangelism he is primarily known for, Adeney is almost as equally outspoken about meaningful physical work. After retiring his corporate issued monitor and keyboard, he built houses. When that venture folded, he pivoted to owning and managing rental properties, with himself doing the maintenance and repair work. And after years of manual labor, when he describes his work efforts in the physical world, he’s poetic.
I was alone in an under-construction cottage sitting atop a steep hill overlooking a peaceful and almost mirror-smooth lake. The full moon’s reflection shimmered just slightly in the tiny surface ripples. All windows were open and the cool midnight forest air streamed into my bright work area where I was carving out the hinge recesses on some new pine doors to be installed into the bedrooms and bathroom. I had been working feverishly for about 8 hours at this point, and hours felt like seconds, and thirty-seconds of an inch felt as big as the universe, I had become so thoroughly sucked in. Great music played nonstop from my construction radio, which I keep stocked with about 300 albums worth of mp3s. The only interruptions were the occasional pauses to roll up and eat another burrito and input/output another quart of water.14
And America’s favorite construction contractor Chip Gaines radiates when describing physical work.
I have spent summers pounding the pavement, selling books door to door. I’ve trimmed trees and mowed acres of grass from dawn to dusk in the hot Texas sun–though not as hot as selling fireworks from a plywood stand during a roasting southern July. I’ve built retaining walls that held up entire hillsides from nothing and constructed new homes from scratch. I have come home at the end of the day weighing less than when I left in the morning, just from the copious amounts of water weight I’d lost through sweating. Perspiration and aching muscles don’t bother me a bit. In fact, if I haven’t worn myself out by the end of the day, if I don’t come home with bruises or scratches, then I don’t feel right. I feel unsettled, like I’ve shorted myself somehow. But when I’ve physically worked hard, it feels like a day well spent, and I’ve loved every minute of it.15
While Mr. Money Mustache and Chip Gaines capture the beauty of what one may gain from manual labor, Matthew Crawford, author of Shop as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, laments what one loses when one’s work self is abstracted from the physical self.
“I’ve repeatedly heard modern workers are compensated for their time, but I believe that is only a half-truth. To be compensated by definition implies you are receiving money “in recognition of loss, suffering, or injury incurred; recompense.”16 What are we willing to be compensated for — in the full sense of the word? What is my loss or suffering or injury caused by the modern employment model? Is it perhaps the reduction of my vast ability to reason diversely and to create individually to a set of procedures developed by someone else, away from my own physical domain?”17
Wendell Berry distills this idea with the statement, “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.”18 To Berry and Crawford, the ideal is to physically labor in your own domain — where your daily existence is centered. To a degree, this makes sense, because this is the most personally impactful and fulfilling work you can do.
Recognizing the reality that we live in a deeply interdependent society, where we need goods and services and money to fulfill obligations to ourselves (food to eat, hygienic shelter), our community (public utilities, public education, public amenities), and the government (taxes). Accordingly, when outsourcing our labor, the second most fulfilling work is in our physical local communities. Unfortunately for the modern office worker, the domain of our “work” is national, international, or entirely virtual scope. We’re taking our minds from our own homes and local domains and in the process diluting our personal fulfillment.
[1] Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21162437/
[3] https://content.iospress.com/articles/brain-plasticity/bpl190084
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5934999/
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18726137/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21495519/, among many more
[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/605223/us-fitness-health-club-market-size-2007-2021/ and https://www.statista.com/statistics/275035/global-market-size-of-the-health-club-industry/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_labour
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/well/move/work-exercise-heart-disease-cancer.html
[9]https://financesonline.com/gym-membership-statistics/
[10] Palapa Structures, Somis, CA
[11] Bock, J. and Harnick, S. (1964). If I Were a Rich Man [Song]. On Fiddler On the Roof. Emphasis added.
[12] See https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ for more info on MMM
[13] Financial Independence, Retire Early, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-retire-early-fire.asp
[14] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/07/20/get-rich-with-carpentry-and-home-renovation/
[15] Capital Gaines, Chip Gaines, p. 125
[16] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/compensate
[17] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft
[18] The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry, p. 79
Bribunk 