In 2010 I went to prune trees in Australia. Immediately, my depression stopped. Almost as if using the full body made everything better than using only the brain and speaking to a computer all day.
+1, I've been an on-and-off brush cutter and tree planter for several years. I can fully confirm this: physical work outdoors does wonders to mental health.
The interesting part is that I can be really exhausted from a day in the woods, struggling to somehow get to the car, etc -- but after 7-8 hours of decent sleep, all of this is gone! No muscle pains next morning, no nothing. It is incredible how well our body can handle and cure physical stress.
Coping with mental exhaustion or overwork, however, seems to be way harder for me -- to the point of ruining the next day entirely. A deep explanation of this deviation (our abilities for physical recovery vs mental recovery) would be really interesting.
One thing I found when I worked on farms clearing paddocks or putting up fences was you always had a sense of accomplishment. You could look back at your days effort and see it while you had a cold drink.
I work 18 hours on a presentation for the exec at work and the next day it is like it never happened. I never get the real mental pay off that I would get if I spent 18 hours clearing a paddock.
Concur 100%. I've always made sure my work has some physical component. Even if that's just soldering, I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today.
The quickest way to crush someone's spirit is to make them feel that their work is for nothing. Making prisoners break rocks in the prison yard, for instance. Or pushing spreadsheets and git commits endlessly, to no tangible change.
> I need to use my hands and know that something is different tomorrow because I did this work today.
Mhm, in physical work, you always see a result -- even if it's a mess or failure. You get direct, no-bullshit feedback every single day. Mental work, in contrast, most typically ends in an abstraction: you work all day long and there is a result, but you can't always see it the way you see a planted tree in the forest.
Yup, I'm a primitive creature, devastatingly tied to the simplest of my senses: seeing, hearing, touching.
It’s funny how many tech people are getting into trades or very manual hobbies. I keep ending up at the page for my local community college’s woodworking program. Most of my hobbies now are DIY projects.
I got back into woodworking at the start of the pandemic and couldn’t recommend it more. Something about working with your hands resets your brain in a way that computer work does not.
