I haven’t posted anything in a while so I wanted to share some updates and, hopefully, some helpful insights from what I’ve been up to the past 6-7 months.
How Buying a House Led to a Blue Collar Job Pivot
First off, back in December of 2025 my wife and I bought a house. I’m sure I don’t have to say this, but purchasing a home is a massive undertaking (especially being 1st time home buyers). Not only is the administrative process lengthy but, of course, there’s managing all the new quirks that come with buying a home (an old home in our case). HVAC, plumbing, electrical, painting, crawl space, appliances, and so on. In an interesting plot twist, all the projects I had been doing around the house made me realize that I really enjoy working with my hands. As I have talked about many times, I have spent the past 7 years working as a security guard. Though I appreciated that security work was generally low stress, I found it frustrating due to the complete lack of challenge involved. The problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do otherwise…
I’ll repeat this list for the umpteenth time, lol:
- Yes, I have an engineering degree. NO!!! I haven’t had, don’t have, and, for the foreseeable future, won’t have an interest in working as an engineer.
- If $100,000 fell out of the sky, I would go back to school and become a physical therapist. However, college debt is something I am no longer willing to take on. Furthermore, the American Healthcare System makes it so that I would most certainly not want to work in a traditional healthcare setting. I would want to open my own clinic and do things my own way. Probably treating people with practices that I currently implement daily in my own physical training. If that’s the case, why not just personal train people and skip going back to school? Which leads to my final point…
- There are very few jobs that pay a salary in the fitness industry. They usually want you to have a degree in Exercise Physiology. Otherwise, I could become a personal trainer at a gym but, as I have said before, I have never met anyone able to make a sustainable living caring for a family and a home with their only source of income being personal training. This has been the same for those who work as trainers for a larger organization and for those who are in business for themselves. Not to say these people don’t exist, they’re just rare and I have yet to meet one in person.
I love moving my body. I like working with my hands. I like technical problems. I had been doing some investigation into working in building maintenance as I moved into the house with my wife. In doing so, I found a job working in manufacturing that I started in April. It’s still very early and this could definitely change, but for the first time in my life, I actually like my job. I don’t love it, but it’s more than just a chore. Traditionally, that’s what jobs have always been for me. I work because I need money. That’s it, a chore. But in my new manufacturing role I find myself actually interested in what I’m doing and time seems to fly by when I’m at work. Again, it’s early so this could change in 6 months, but so far, so good. This is a HUGE victory in my book.
Blue Collar Work or Any Physical Job Does Not Have to Destroy Your Body
“Why would a guy with an engineering degree want to work on a manufacturing floor?!”
As I was taking this job I heard this concern from someone. He was encouraging me to understand that the human body has limits and being on the floor in manufacturing would wear my body out prematurely. Like so many things in our world there’s a story that Americans have about Blue Collar work: ‘It’s Honorable’, ‘It’s the backbone of our society’, and ‘It destroys your body’. This as opposed to white collar work which often happens in office environments or remote settings mediated by computers. These jobs being physically comfortable and higher paying, generally. But here’s what I know: Through conscious intelligent physical training, you can reverse the negative impacts of chronic physical, mental , and emotional trauma. Furthermore, sedentary white collar jobs ruin your body in their own way, just like a blue collar job can. This is particularly true when the individual is not making any effort to reverse or mitigate the impact of their job on their body.
All this to say, I’m 44 years old and I just started doing blue collar work for the first time in my life. I like using my body. I like being physically tired at the end of the day. I like having to squat, reach, bend, and lift. I like doing all this while also solving the problems that pop up along the way and trying to master how to be more efficient in prepping my parts and using my tools. And I still workout everyday and I’ve made some big flexibility gains just in the 2 months that I have been working in this new role.
To continue on this theme, there have been several projects around the house that have required a fair amount of physical capacity. For example, getting up in the attic. There are no stairs or a ladder. I have to climb up on a six foot ladder and then do a jumping dip to get up onto the ceiling joists. Then I have to balance as I walk around on the ceiling joists while bent over. Sometimes I duck walk from joist to joist. There was a time in my 20’s in the military when I was in what many people would call ‘good shape’. At that time my knees would not have been capable of handling the flexed position required in a duck walk. Now, I can do this while balancing on narrow joists in my attic, after having worked hard all day in a manufacturing environment, and then still workout.
Learning About My Body and Training Consistently Has Created a Unique Opportunity
I don’t love my job. However, for the first time in my life, I do like my job and that’s a massive win. Given my history of physical problems, I would not be able to do this job and I would not have been confident to attack some of the issues in my new home, if I hadn’t developed such a passion and love of physical training.
The moral of the story is that increased ability creates more opportunity. We know this from our work lives. More skill and knowledge tends to create more economic opportunity in the work we choose. The same is true with our bodies. More skill, knowledge, and experience tends to create more capacity in our bodies with time. More capacity means the ability to take on challenges/opportunities that may have otherwise been out of reach. For me, this has led to the ability to conceptualize having a long career working for a company, where that’s never seemed possible before.
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Travis Daigle 
Thank you for being you and for sharing 😌