it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.
My family comes from poverty and hard work, my grandmother died last November at the age of 96, she worked, mainly as a farmer, her entire life up until 3/4 years ago.
I've never seen her tired, she never looked like she was not gonna finish what she started because it was too much.
Truth is physical work is hard only if you're not used to it.
Your body adapts to the amount of energy you give to it.
The harder the job, the more it takes to adapt, but it happens.
Well, unless we're talking about extreme malnutrition, but I've honestly never seen it in the west, not even in the deep country of central Italy, where my family comes from.
After a while working the fields is a lot less hard than climbing a dozen steps twice a day after you sat all day eating snacks, drinking sodas and basically not exercising at all.
Hard work today, IMHO, is working at Amazon's storage facilities, where stress adds up to what's basically legalized slavery and the workers cannot even work at their own pace because they have to work at the machines speed.
I enjoy hard labour, just not for 40 hours or more a week, every week. People doing traditional agriculture have to bust their ass during planting and harvest, but the rest of the time they aren't working that hard.
Same with sitting at a computer, doing it all the time drives me insane. I've got various hobbies and interests I'm passionate about, just not so passionate that I want to do them full time for the rest of my life.
