Physical pain was much more accepted by people who worked physically hard for a living in 1960. I was 12 in 1960 but already I took pride that I could work all day (8 hours) digging a footing for a house for 1 dollar an hour cash on a Saturday or Sunday. Two of my friends worked with me in this as well. By Sunday I looked down at my hands which were covered with bleeding blisters and I realized I needed to bring gloves on Sunday to finish the work with my friends.
This year also I began working with my father summers as an Electrician's helper. He sent me places where he couldn't go. At 12 I was still only 5 foot 2 inches tall and he could send me under houses where it was too small for him to go. I could still fit in under 12 inches of clearance under a house then and save him hundreds or thousands of dollars in repairing ceiling and walls by stringing flex to run wire through under the houses in Los Angeles County then. He had his own Electrical Contracting business then. So I was learning his trade at 12 during the summers from my father.
By the time I was 17 and I was 6 feet 4 inches tall and 22 I was almost 6 foot 5 I could wire any house or commercial building from the plans as long as someone gave me the materials to work with. I felt ready for a career in Electrical or Construction work by then whenever I wanted to do that. However, I chose to go to college at 18 instead. By 21 I had burned out with being a Computer programmer on Batch computing which made progamming pretty maddening before microprocessors and RAM (random access memory) which means you can access any information in a multiplicity of ways and not just one way.
I kept computer science as a hobby and later bought my first home computer a TRS 80 for around 800 dollars in 1978. I taught all my older children to program in basic starting around 1980 to 1987 when we bought an IBM Clone AT computer and Epsom printer for around 2500 dollars and I taught my older children MS-Dos and further how to program games and other things they were interested in at that time. Later they were teaching me things as time progressed and newer generations of Pentium based computers came into being for sale as home computers.
By age 28 I realized I didn't like working for other people and began starting my own businesses. This worked much better for me as I am an idea person rather than a plodder, though I can plod too if my survival depends upon it, I would rather not. So, in using my innovative spirit and intelligence I found much more useful to create the rest of my life with from age 28 on.
In 1960, work was NOT exercise. It could sometimes just be brutal destroying your body day by day. This made many people alcoholics just to deal with the pain from their bodies being destroyed on a daily basis by what they did for a living. However, this also created much more spousal abuse as well then. People were generally not as evolved in their thinking as now because most people hadn't even graduated High School Then.
This all changed with the Viet Nam War with young men realizing they might stay alive and not come home in a box if they went to college rather than joining the army or getting drafted. Young women joined them in college first to Marry a college guy and then secondarily to have careers of their own at first. The long run of this we see today when almost everyone goes to some college and often most people you meet now might have at least one college degree whether this actually helps them or not I'm not sure anymore.
However, I will say here that everyone I know who had the mental discipline to get at least one college degree also tends to have the discipline to start businesses, get married, raise children and everything else. Somehow the suffering it actually takes to get a College degree tends to help people as long as they don't get a really dumb degree that they then can't pay off their student loans from because there is no job except at Burger King when they are done.
So, it could be said of this kind of person that College loans ended their lives before they got started.
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