As you know, I read the book “Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber, and I liked it a lot. This book was also fairly popular in the masculine corners of the internet; indeed, there’s a lot of talk about how miserable and emasculating white collar corporate jobs are. And that’s all certainly true, believe me.

But I will say this: being an adult with life experience, I know that anybody who says that the answer is merely “have everybody work in manual labor jobs” is usually some embittered teenage boy who has never held a real job in his life. Because manual labor absolutely blows.

I take that back, I should specify: unskilled manual labor sucks. I am not a skilled tradesman, but I can imagine that owning your own plumbing or stonemasonry business is very rewarding: You set your own hours, you don’t have to deal with shithead co-workers, and you make great money. In fact, I know that this is the case—one of my father’s best friends is a tradesman, a leather tanner. He’ll make one or two luxury suitcases or purses a week, make several thousand dollars, and that’s it. A pretty good life if you’ve got the skills for it. The closest I’ve ever come to this schedule is working odd jobs in unskilled and semi-skilled labor via the Takl app, but that is of course nothing you can do full time.

But I must repeat: working unskilled labor at somebody else’s scheduling is absolutely dreadful. I’ve worked in construction, furniture moving, warehousing, and they all were the labor equivalent of testicle cancer. If you work jobs like that, look forward to 13 hour days and absolutely no job security whatsoever.

I’m sure that union construction is great money, but as I’ve discussed previously, leftists now care more about the really important issues like transgender bathrooms and putting children in drag than, y’know, the labor force or anything insignificant like that.

So having experience in both white and blue collar labor, I feel that my current job situation is probably the best I’ve worked so far, and may in fact be a solution to the bullshit job phenomena, a middle ground between the Golgotha toil of the blue collar and the castrated ennui of the white collar. And it’s almost mind-bogglingly simple.

Simply put, I am referring to a situation in which half the working time is devoted to strenuous physical labor, and the other half is devoted to mental and intellectual labor.

Without going into too much detail, my current job situation is almost exactly that. Half of my work week involves working at a desk in an office, and the other half involves grueling physical labor (albeit one on a fixed schedule for once). I feel that these things balance each other out; just when I get bored and start to feel emasculated from the desk labor, here’s the next day and I’m straining my muscles and laboring hard in the hot sun. After a couple of days of that, when I start to get annoyed with the backbreaking toil and drudgery, I’m back to using my brain and sitting in air conditioning.

It truly makes one appreciate both sides of the labor force—the balance of yin and yang and all that.

So the question is: how do we make it so everybody can have a situation like this, rather than having it be unique to myself? Sadly, much like the Graeber book it doesn’t seem like there’s an easy solution beyond “radical corporate restructure so that office drones are also doing grunt labor”. And no, Mr. Graeber, UBI is not the solution! Nonetheless, if you can get into this situation, I’d recommend it…

…Assuming of course that both the physical and mental labors are rewarding immediately and consistently: I was, after all, in a vaguely similar condition as a personal trainer, except that neither the physical or mental labor were rewarding in the slightest.