Trees and grass and other green things around you in the garden have a positive psychological effect. The feeling of having done something visible has a positive psychological effect. Getting a physical workout has a positive psychological effect.
I know yours is a humorous comment, but a child digging in a garden has nothing to do with them yearning to be an early-capitalism style child laborer.
Crazy thing is, walking 20 miles a day isn't burning that many calories. By the end of the day, if it is flat ground and you're used to it, 20 miles isn't even enough to be sore or tired…
I knew a kid who loved bass fishing, but there were carp in the creek near where he lived. So he would go out at night and bowhunt the carp. In a couple years he'd cleared miles of river of the nasty things, and he had the best bass fishing in the area.
Later on he went to college and got a degree in fisheries.
Who was that guy that discovered something very important in physics, and he said the elves told him about it? The elves that were in the massive holes/caves he would dig in his back property, as his outlet. I forget how large his friends said the tunnels were, but he clearly spent a lot of time digging tunnels.
John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.
Cray has been called solitary, uncommunicative, secretive, and difficult to get on with. Frank Sumner, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, met Cray on several occasions and refutes suggestions that he was a prickly character: "He was a very friendly man, and perhaps the greatest all-round computer scientist ever", says Sumner.
I live in Houston. Everything is clay. That shit gets stuck to your shovel and does not come off.
That being said, we had some woods behind our house and we would play out there all the time. Digging, pellet guns, machetes to chop down trees and make forts.
I had a great time with my brother in law a couple years ago shoveling snow off my parents drive....
So much so we continued into the road and did a houses length in each direction.
was fun (when we were done) watching cars struggle almost all the way up the road until they got to our bit, have a couple seconds of perfect driving experience, before re entering the icy hellscape.
Turns out exercise and purpose is good for kids. Breathing through disappointment is a buddhist technique, a letting go technique. But letting go is only half of mental health. The other half is going after things.
Hell yeah! I did this kind of thing a lot with my kids. Give them a backpack, a flip phone, lunch and drinks and tell them to go explore a hill visible from the house.
I unwittingly terraformed a huge swath of land that started flooding when they flattened out the gravel road to our house over the course of a month or so with a spade when I was 10. This post is weirdly accurate.
I sometimes think of going back there to see what happened since but I'm not sure if someone lives there these days.
I love to dig. My dad used to get mad at me for failing classes in school, which happened often. He'd say, "Do you wanna go dig ditches for a living?!"
Now I'm a software developer and yeah I like it. It shuts my brain off. I wish I could do it part time or even just as an exercise but I live in a suburb and any time you want to dig you have to make a phone call and wait for someone to come out
Have you considered calling the locating service, get them to mark the entire yard, and then taking pictures so you know areas are okay to dig in going forward? I’ve been considering doing that for my yard just so I know where I can safely landscape.
I've done it before! I think its illegal to dig before calling. A friend of mine was digging in his yard and found an underground cable of some kind, almost took it out with a spade. Probably would have cost a pretty penny, with court fees to boot! Maybe I should take an ad out and offer to help dig for people. Maybe i could get a couple jobs a week, and I would do it for free or travel money and pizza at least
This, but it's my ADHDAF ass stacking firewood with my dad. Eventually, when I was old enough, I even got to use the splitter and the sledgehammer. Now I'm a grown ass man and Pittsburgh is technically subtropical so he doesn't heat the house with wood anymore, but in years of studying I've never found a more effective meditation than 3 hours of splitting and stacking firewood.