And then in all likelihood, your body is shot by age 40 and you are looking for a new career where you don’t have to carry heavy things and crawl into tiny dirty spaces anymore either. This is the thing I keep telling my son - the trades are fine potentially when you are young, but you don’t want to be doing them still when you are 60.
This is total nonsense. By your 60s, a smart person who has been in the trades since their early 20s should own an independent business or at the very least manage a team of people / apprentices who can do the heavy lifting. This is no different than the fact that most software engineers still working in their 60s are almost all either managers, senior architects, or independent consultants with a solid client base.
My appliance repair guy works every day with his father who is in his early 70s, and the younger guy does all the hard physical labor of lifting and dragging dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. and you can tell the old guy would rather be working every day with his son than sitting on the couch twiddling his thumbs. The other version story is my uncle who built a local landscaping company. He did backbreaking work every day sunrise to sunset when he was young, and then by middle age he was hiring crews to do the labor. In his 60s he is fully retired with money for a second vacation home in Mexico and lots of toys.
