My body is my trade — what do I do as it wears down?

You say your hands and body are the whole business. True. But listen to how you said it — like weather, like something that just happens to you. Some of it is weather. But some of it is choice: the extra shift you took, the warning twinge you called nothing, the stretch you skipped because you were tired. You are not alone in this trade. Others share the bench, the floor, the route. Most crews still treat each body as a private machine, run until it breaks, then quietly swapped out. That is the comfortable lie. The honest truth: the bodies doing this work are the team's shared asset. Their decline is a team problem long before it becomes one worker's ruin. The real question is not whether the work costs you something. It will. The question is whether you spend that cost on purpose — paced, shared, named early — or whether it gets taken from you all at once, in one injury, with no say in the terms.