It’s easy to see how and why physical labor is hard work. It physically beats your body down over the course of years. I did manual construction labor for about half a decade and realized fairly quickly that I didn’t like the prospects of being a fifty-year-old guy who had done this work for 35 years and I was able to get out of physical labor by the time I was 20 years old.
I like physical labor. I like the idea of strengthening my body and developing that tough grittiness that only comes from working with your hands. I like the skills you learn and how incredibly useful it is to know how to build a wall, wire a light switch, fix a plumbing valve, and install hardwood flooring. But I don’t like the life that it takes from you.
Knowledge work, on the other hand, is easy to look at and assume that it’s easy to do. You just sit there all day and “work.” That’s what most people think (including those who do knowledge work.)
The difficulty of knowledge work is that it fatigues your mind to the point of physical exhaustion. If you’ve ever spent a day really studying, you probably know what I’m talking about. It also places the knowledge worker in a position of continual mental battles in trying to maintain focus.
With modern technology, any distraction you want is a click away. Just one click and you’ve lost your focus and that flow state in which you are extremely productive. With most physical labor, you can leave your phone in the truck and have many more steps (literally) between you and a distraction.
While physical work is physically taxing, knowledge work takes immense mental focus and strain with the temporary relief from that strain (all the distractions of the internet, social media, Netflix, etc…) dangling just one click away. And the more the knowledge worker gets distracted, the more difficult it becomes to focus.
This modern difficulty of knowledge work is self-inflicted, but social media, etc… are created in such a way to exploit this weakness in the human and most knowledge workers probably don’t even understand how deep the problem they have is.
It’s hard to compare physical and knowledge work, but it’s easy to write off knowledge work as if it’s easy. It’s not. Just because you can’t understand the difficulties, does not mean that the difficulties don’t exist.
For the knowledge worker, my advice is to disconnect as much as possible. Shut off your phone and block all social media and entertainment websites on your computer(s) and sink into the scary, uncomfortableness of having to do deep work. Once you’ve started doing it, you will love it and you’ll feel much more accomplished in the end.