Sure, and that's happened. I'm in better shape than I was, and there's more work to be done. My hands are now crazy strong, fingers thick as sausages.
But decades of typing and this kind of work aggravated my carpal tunnel and it was not pleasant. I'd wake up in the mornings because of crippling pain in my right hand. It would take me hours of ice to get it to subside. There's only so much you can do with ergonomics though in flooring, and I did the best I could. The ten hour shifts were deadline-oriented and I won't go into that since I had no choice. But,...
Few weeks after I finished installing my floors (and demolishing what was there before, and carrying 3,000 lbs of material in beforehand) I had my A/C serviced. The guy was in his mid-50s, and he complimented me on the job. "You did this yourself?" Then he asked some more questions. He said my long lines (25'+) were straight, which was a big deal for me since I spent an entire day brooding over the starting line and re-measuring over and over again with a chalk-line and laser levels. "This looks like professional work" he said.
After he left, found out from his supervisor that the guy worked in flooring for 23 years, running his own business, and he watched it die during the last market crash. In the end it was him and another guy doing a job a day, which sq-ft for sq-ft was basically them working 5-6 times faster than me, and better.
The man favored his both knees the entire time he was working here, and had menthol/wet wraps around his hands that he kept renewing. Evaporative cooling does only so much to reduce swelling. Anyhow, I can't imagine working that hard for decades, and my 10 hour shifts were nothing compared to what he did day after day after day.
I can definitely see things your way. We're overdue for some kind of a multiplayer game experiment demo thing to be shared, like that multiplayer orbiting game. Hell, here's my nodejs-powered webgl doodlepad: http://faye.pp19dd.com/index2.php
But there's a common thread here. This particular collection of thoughts on this site reflect life and career arcs. Parallelism to us is that plenty of us developers are burning out (like eeve), seeking changes, having epiphanies.
That's obviously because we're growing older and maturing like everyone else, computers and stuff are changing drastically, competition and proliferation of tools is high, and we're caught up in middle of it all. Hell, I have a fantasy of becoming a woodworker and am a tool away from having a decent set (router). Maybe I'll try my luck at flea markets.
It's definitely easier for me to center some divs and write a fractal compression algorithm than work 10-hour shifts doing backbreaking labor. I know this because I did it for a couple of weeks replacing all my floors, and I did a pretty good job of it. The part that sucks is that it was more satisfying than programming, but it'll never be sustainable for me to do that kind of labor in the long run. :/
But decades of typing and this kind of work aggravated my carpal tunnel and it was not pleasant. I'd wake up in the mornings because of crippling pain in my right hand. It would take me hours of ice to get it to subside. There's only so much you can do with ergonomics though in flooring, and I did the best I could. The ten hour shifts were deadline-oriented and I won't go into that since I had no choice. But,...
Few weeks after I finished installing my floors (and demolishing what was there before, and carrying 3,000 lbs of material in beforehand) I had my A/C serviced. The guy was in his mid-50s, and he complimented me on the job. "You did this yourself?" Then he asked some more questions. He said my long lines (25'+) were straight, which was a big deal for me since I spent an entire day brooding over the starting line and re-measuring over and over again with a chalk-line and laser levels. "This looks like professional work" he said.
After he left, found out from his supervisor that the guy worked in flooring for 23 years, running his own business, and he watched it die during the last market crash. In the end it was him and another guy doing a job a day, which sq-ft for sq-ft was basically them working 5-6 times faster than me, and better.
The man favored his both knees the entire time he was working here, and had menthol/wet wraps around his hands that he kept renewing. Evaporative cooling does only so much to reduce swelling. Anyhow, I can't imagine working that hard for decades, and my 10 hour shifts were nothing compared to what he did day after day after day.