Yes. I have worked manual jobs in the past(repairing bicycles, working at a warehouse and as a driver and for a while at a semi-construction job that involved being outside a lot) and I feel like overall I was more consistently happy. I would come home and do coding in my own time to satisfy the intellectual needs.
The handful of manual labor jobs I've had (delivering water, installing business projects), left me bored and tired at the end of the day. Any health benefits of the exercise I got was taken away from the boredom of waiting around for person/thing to get from point A to B. There's a reason why many construction workers are overweight.
Yes, but if you do construction or manual labor of any kind as a living (i.e. for years, decades), it leaves your body frail and broken. With programming, you only have to watch for relatively minor things like carpal tunnel and bad posture.
I'm reasonably certain that plenty of people do manual labor for a living who don't end up "frail and broken", and that decades spent in a sedentary position can have detrimental health effects beyond mere bad posture. And carpal tunnel is no joke.
Either can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, but on balance the human body benefits more from physical exertion than the lack of it.
My concern with manual labor jobs is not the effect on my body, it's the effect on the mind. Like I said in the previous comment, after a hard day of manual labor, sure I was tired, but I was mostly bored out of my mind. Moving some heavy object X from position A to position B gets less romantic when you've done it 50 times.
Sitting in an office desk for 30 years can't be good for you either, but if it's in a position to keep my brain active (even if my muscles aren't), I'd take that job a thousand times before going back to pure labor.
In fact, one of the most memorable parts of those summer jobs was creating a shoulder rest for the 25 lbs bottles to sit on, out of discarded plastic. I honestly can't remember whether it worked at all or not, but I definitely remember being far more interested designing and cutting this piece of plastic than carrying bottles of water.
