For me it is for the sense of accomplishment.

Even 35 years later I can drive by a house or building I helped to build and there it stands. Sure everything I ever worked on will one day return to dust. But likely not in my lifetime.

When I switched to IT, I made a lot more money, worried a great deal more, worked much longer hours, slept a great deal less and suffered fools constantly. I worked on hundreds of projects over the years. I doubt that any are still functioning.

In my experience, all work is hard. And it’s difficult to compare the physical demands of manual labor to the intellectual demands of IT work. But there is something to be said for a job that stops when you leave the job site to a job that never stops at all. There is also something to be said for a job that pays overtime and double time when a deadline needs to be met to a job that expects overtime every day of every week for years on end.