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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board asked “Have you ever had a job that felt like it was shaving years off your life?” — and the brutal work stories poured in. Stories ranged from over 300 hours of overtime doing convenience store deliveries, to quitting a construction job after just two months, to a rotation of working 30 minutes in a -30°C freezer warehouse followed by stepping out into 30°C+ heat in the middle of summer, with many voices highlighting the sheer physical toll of manual labor. Meanwhile, others shared experiences from the IT industry, including a “burning” project where overtime topped 140 hours a month for three straight months. One comment suggesting that “just sitting and typing on a PC all day sounds easy” drew pushback from desk workers, who countered that “moving your body is way easier” — sparking a debate over which type of work is actually more brutal.
What people said
I was doing manual labor part-time jobs too, so yeah, that seriously took years off my life.
Are you still lean now?
Seems like you'd naturally pack on weight after retiring
Over 300 hours of overtime plus an irregular schedule
Isn't that shipping company kind of messed up?
In Kanagawa, convenience store route deliveries usually have pretty fixed start and end times, from what I know
construction was by far the toughest.
Quit after about two months, no joke
Re: #11
The old guys who've worked these jobs for decades might just be physical elites, honestly
I bailed after 2 hours — that's not a job for humans
Did you get enough sleep?
That's definitely shaving years off your life
Kept that up for about 2 months, only making it home on weekends
Glad it wrapped up after 2 months.
If that went on forever your mental health would break
Night shift day 2: 3pm-7am (overtime guaranteed, clock out at noon)
Then a day shift from 6am-8pm because they're short-staffed right after the night shifts
Day off
Repeat forever
A Yamazaki Bread (major Japanese bakery company) employee I worked with part-time back in the day was like that
lol (that's rough)
That's a pretty malicious work environment
Also got a herniated disc and had trouble walking
A herniated disc needs surgery, right?
Can you walk now?
I can walk now, but I basically can't do anything that strains my back anymore, so I'm jobless
That's rough.
Are you on disability pension or something?
Can't you even get that much?
Having to time your button presses for the bar symbol every single game sounds exhausting too
Three months straight of over 140 hours overtime, which blew past the legal cap (the "Article 36" overtime limit), and my boss genuinely chewed me out for it.
Between the lack of sleep and terrible diet, I gained over 15kg in a year
I hear this a lot, but isn't it just sitting and tapping away at a PC? In a nice air-conditioned room, too.
From the perspective of someone doing manual labor in terrible conditions, it looks easy — but is it actually still rough?
Moving your body is overwhelmingly easier, trust me
There's actual data showing that sitting for long periods clearly raises your risk of death.
It's literally shaving years off your life
It was a ridiculous company where the average tenure was 2 months.
Every month 10 people quit and 10 new people came in.
One of the girls there kept crying and saying she wanted to quit while working, but nobody had the spare capacity to care about anyone else, so everyone just ignored her
Why would anyone join a company like that in the first place?
Just an hour of sleep used to make my body feel lighter.
Now that I sleep around 5 hours, my body feels heavy instead
A nap genuinely brings you back to life.
Just 20 minutes of sleep would clear my head and shake off a good chunk of the fatigue — enough to think 'alright, let's push through'
In the middle of summer: 30 minutes working at -30°C, then a 1-hour break exposed to temperatures over 30°C — on rotation
Some people can handle it fine, but it wrecked my autonomic nervous system
I once went inside a large freezer for construction work too, and yeah, that's no joke.
I went in during summer and my body genuinely glitched out in a single day.
I thought it was funny that all the workers were wearing coats in the middle of summer — turns out the joke was on me
People say that a lot, but night-shift workers can sleep during the day, so isn't it the same thing?
The shift that runs from night into morning is brutal.
It'd be fine if you could sleep soundly during the day, but it's hard to pull that off most of the time, so it was rough.
People who retired from that job tended to pass away not long after, too
They should just fix the shift times and adjust pay by time slot instead.
No need to deliberately make people work all sorts of different hours
Just when your body clock adjusts to nights, they rotate you to mornings.
Just when it adjusts to mornings, they rotate you to nights.
That's genuinely insane
Because they want to keep labor costs down
If they switched to a two-shift system, overtime pay would get expensive, and they can't afford to stop the machines
Background and Key Points
The phrase “blew past the Article 36 limit” mentioned in the thread refers informally to exceeding the overtime cap set under Article 36 of Japan’s Labor Standards Act (the “36 Agreement”), and exceeding it constitutes a violation of that law. The IT worker’s report of over 140 hours of overtime for three straight months is well beyond this legal ceiling. Meanwhile, the claim that “sitting all day raises your risk of death” draws on multiple epidemiological studies linking prolonged sitting to risks such as cardiovascular disease — evidence that desk work isn’t simply “easy” on the body. Posters cited labor costs and the need to keep production lines running as reasons three-shift systems don’t use fixed hours, but working late-night and early-morning shifts is known to disrupt the body clock, with long-term health risks flagged as a result. Whether manual labor or desk work is more brutal can’t be reduced to a simple comparison — the type of strain varies by industry and work format, which is worth keeping in mind.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Have you ever had a job that felt like it was shaving years off your life?“
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