I think you may be over-romanticizing the value of outdoor work here. Let's take agriculture as an example of doing manual work outdoors. How is it more alienat

I think you may be over-romanticizing the value of outdoor work here. Let's take agriculture as an example of doing manual work outdoors. How is it more alienating to have a project held up by corporate inefficiency than by freak variances of weather? How is it not just as stressful to see a crop ruined by a hailstorm, or a chance summer shower at the wrong time destroy the value of hay that is ready to bale? Speaking as someone who grew up with this, and has also worked an assembly-line job in the past, it was actually easier to get into a meditative 'in the zone' state doing that than tilling a field or constructing a fence. And isn't having to milk the same cows twice a day, every single day the embodiment of the "species of work that never ends"? This isn't strictly due to modern agriculture, either. Poor timing/freak weather events in the past wouldn't just cause farmers to lose their livelihood, it would also mean there was a very real risk of starvation. While losing your job and comfortable livelihood can certainly be stressful, there seem to be quite a few people who believe that work in the past wasn't just as, if not more, stressful.