Manual work is not unsatisfying - the problems have to do with social disrespect, low pay, and lack of a safety net if your physical abilities decline.

People in the hacker news sphere underestimate the value or all labor. There is nothing inherently superior to coding - we are all just lucky recipients of the money and acclaim that this obscure skill has rewarded for the last couple of decades.

I took a few years off of programming to raise toddlers, clean, cook, volunteer in preschool and church, and it was a lot of fun and certainly challenging in the best sense of having to learn strategies and tactics to improve my outcomes and so on and fully engaging my whole person.

We may currently allocate resources to people one way but there’s not really a law of physics that condemns us to keep that same allocation if conditions change in the future.