How to make manual labour work for you

If there really are lucrative physical jobs going begging, don’t be shy to get your hands dirty.

Fencing firms are under a lot of strain. Tree planting contractors have holes to fill. They’re offering well-paid work, but can’t find anyone willing to get their hands dirty.

Skilled planters can supposedly earn as much as

$400 a day. The fencers are offering up to $35 an hour.

Where are all the good keen workers at? In an opinion piece that was difficult to distinguish from satire, one young man explained that ‘‘just the thought of having dried mud on my hands makes me physically ill’’.

Our generation is way too smart to get suckered into wrecking our bodies for the sake of a few thousand extra bucks, he reckoned.

As a fellow young person, I respectfully disagree. I was a part-time manual labourer through my teens, including picking fruit, spraying weeds, and building mountain bike trails. I learned how to jackknife a trailer, bunny-hop a tractor, and destroy a gearbox. I got stung, blistered, burned, filthy, and soaked to the skin with alarming regularity.

My only source of entertainment in these long hours was a discman which skipped with every step, and was so heavy that it pulled my baggy uniform shorts down over my satin boxers. I’ll never forget the glorious day I upgraded to an MP3 player, with its 12 songs.

In spite of everything, I look back on those days fondly. It was hard graft, but deeply satisfying. Clutching a fat envelope full of sweet Sir Edmunds in your grubby paw is much more visceral than the silent bank transfer of a monthly salary.

If you compare the health outcomes of getting strenuous exercise in the great outdoors against hunching over a computer for several decades, it’s probably a wash.

Avoiding discomfort is misguided, because exposure to low-level stressors is how we grow and develop. The human body is not some delicate piece of china. ‘‘Back-breaking’’ is swinging a 20-pound sledgehammer for 10 hours a day, six days a week, or running down the street collecting full rubbish bins by hand, like they did in the bad old-fashioned days. When it comes to physicality, we modern humans really are degenerates.

Of course, it’s all too easy to glamorise manual labour as some kind of romantic endeavour, communing with nature and making an honest living from the sweat of your brow.

I recently spent a weekend planting trees and cutting out wild ginger on my brother’s property. Being an insufferable Fitbit owner, I proudly announced we had traversed the equivalent of 50 storeys, or 15 kilometres up hill and down dale. When we were done, we had a huge feed and some homebrew. It was fun.

But doing it day after day is about the most souldestroyingly boring thing I can imagine. For me – a lily-handed professional writer – it’s a quaint tourism experience, in which I get to play dress-ups at being a blue-collar worker again. For other people, it’s a daily reality.

The main thing those six years of menial labour taught me is that I better take school seriously, because I sure as hell didn’t want to dig ditches or pick apples for ever.

If there really are lucrative physical jobs going begging, I encourage anyone on the fence to go get your hands dirty. I would have jumped at the chance in my student days.

Hard work won’t break you. If anything, it’ll make you stronger and more resilient. Even if there’s some exaggeration of the actual pay on offer, it’s much better than what I used to earn. And, of course, there’s one other gigantic game-changer: MP3 players can now store more than 12 songs.

‘Avoiding discomfort is misguided, because exposure to lowlevel stressors is how we grow and develop.’