Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.
IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.
And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.
The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.
It'll exist long after software, too.
Remember that we live in a bubble.
Your assertion assumes either Doomsday scenario (where humans wipe themselves from the face of Earth, and automated machines keep going for a few more decades until disrepair catches up) or some sort of Singularity that makes humanity itself obsolet (a.k.a. Nerd!Rapture).
On the other hand, History teaches that every civilization has their decline and fall. I suspect that software in its current incarnation (electromagnetic encoding of behaviors on a semiconductor based machine) is so tied to our current civilization that it will not survive more than 1 or 2 centuries at the most. But it is easy to imagine future civilizations thousands of years from now that have sophisticated forms of information processing which people alive today would not recognize as "software", even if the principles behind those are the same.
I hope you can learn to live sustainably and in harmony with nature and your own soul before it's too late.
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
It's like expecting writing and/or books to go away three thousand years ago.
Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.
To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.
Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a lot of white collar workers.
As the king you should know local customs, shouldn't you? ;-)
I wouldn't recommend including this kind of perk in the official builders guild code. But honestly, at that rate of physical activity with sudoration and deep breath, alcohol had little noticeable effect and for a very short time.
Also I was doing pawn work (not sure how to translate to English) that's very simple and not dangerous.
Edit: I did work for months delivering beer to bars and little shops with a truck. That was also very continuous work: you were either downloading beer cases or barrels from the truck, very physical work or driving or filling the invoices... to complete the route on time, you could stop very little. Of course nothing that could be called slacking and no alcohol. But mostly everybody got wasted Friday afternoons after work.
From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.
As someone on the outside, hearing horror stories about mandatory 14 hour days and regularly working nights and weekends for startups I'd think they were doing it much worse. It's one of the things that has steered me away from working for a recent startup because I refuse to work more than 8 hours a week.
I had an interview at a startup where I asked the interviewer to take me through my average day at the company. He basically said I'd arrive at 8:30 and leave at 6:30 or 7, sometimes later. I told him that to maintain a healthy work/life balance I would be leaving at 5pm every day and asked him his opinion on that. He said it would be technically acceptable since they can't force you to work more than 8 hours, but would be heavily looked down upon. I didn't take the job.
I've often seriously questioned if I'm cut out for startups because of the relatively low number (much less than 40) of productive hours I put in when things are not pressing at regular jobs.
I could also just be making a bad assumption.
On the other hand stuff like computer programming can be very exhausting if we don't add at least a bit of physical activity to the mix.
And employers in white collar industries perceive such added physical activity as slacking off.