Hacker News Reader

Comment by atom-morgan | Hacker News Reader

Lifting provides much more than improved health.

If you're sick and tired, lift or build shit. Whatever gets you moving.

I doubt I'm alone in this regard. If I spend an hour lifting weights my mind will inevitably wonder how much useful work I could have gotten done outside with the shovel, pickaxe, and wheelbarrow in the same time.

It's a source of depression, for me, once I understood the value of manual labor expended on my own property. Lifting weights has become kind of a pathetic waste of time if I have access to my land where there's an effectively infinite sink for such efforts.

what kind of stuff do you do on the land?

There's been a lot of digging with a shovel and pickaxe, earth-moving with a wheelbarrow, and hauling 100-200lb boulders. (driveway cuts, grade adjustments for water drainage, septic, retaining walls...)

But I also recently rebuilt an old roof, and turned it into a mild climbing+parkour game by not using any ladders. This past month I've gotten quite adept at jumping off a 1-story roof.

There's plans for burying a geothermal ground-loop which will involve digging ~50x10` down to 8', basically digging an in-ground pool by hand, only to fill it back up again.

You can make this stuff as difficult as you want...

Edit: Wanted to mention one of my neighbors has been building underground earthdomes which is very labor-intensive, but has the nice property of turning almost pure labor into thermally ground-coupled housing. Totally unaffected by today's lumber prices for example.

I love the roof and the earth domes.

Perhaps there are other ways to maximize economic output from lifting weights in a way where it wouldn't be a waste of time? An interesting and perhaps a little "out there" proposition would perhaps be mixing the appeal of lifting weights with the OnlyFans demographic? At the very least it seems like there is a far lower capital cost than having to acquire land.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com