Here I sit, at my local farmers market working a stall. Looking around at the farmers and how hard they work, I don’t know many young people that could keep up. Above a certain age and physical condition, maybe. But I know both men and women pushing late 50s that would put a lot of young people to shame.
Probably survivor bias here, you see a bunch of older fit people doing stuff you have a hard time with and you think damn, not realizing how many people have been pushed out of the career over the years due to physical constraints.
Aside from that is the matter of physical characteristics. I am over 6 feet, naturally scrawny but bulky due to lots of strength training. There are many jobs in which I would not last because my body is not made for it.
One of the worst jobs I ever had was making concrete walls that would be shipped around the west to make big buildings. We were working at a windy area, which would sometimes blow the walls around when moving etc. People died every now and then when accidents happened and they would get crushed by a wall. It was cold and physically grueling, much of the workforce were illegal immigrants who would call in sick almost once per week. At one point a foreman told me how much he appreciated how much I showed up for work - I was calling in sick once per month because I couldn't take it.
There was guy there who had been doing the work for 20+ years, he was in astounding shape. He was probably 5 feet tall, extremely wiry, and could walk along a thin concrete wall hanging 20 feet up in the air by two chains without hesitation and if need be walk onto another wall, pick up a tool, turn around and walk onto the hanging one to do something. We would watch him in awe of his abilities. But of course he had done 20+ years of training for this, and had the body type that made him a perfect fit for the job. The other guys who had been there for 20 years worked as hard as him, but they were less well suited to the job than he was.
People underestimate how much experience and conditioning matter for all jobs. When I started working on an LTL dock, I was shocked by how easy it was for guys more than twice my age to do certain things compared to me even though I was younger, stronger, faster, etc...
