I switched in the opposite direction, from an engineering role to software development. My engineering role wasn't exactly manual labour, but at least I had to deal with real hardware sometimes, the joy of which I wrote about in another thread recently [1].
Overall I believe the amount of manual labour had little to do with my job satisfaction ever. For me it is more about building stuff that others find useful and I need to be involved in much of the process. If you never see the outcome of your work it's probably inevitable to find it pointless at some point. If you only ever deal with the outcome of others (like in sales) you might find it pointless as well (at least I did).
Coming back to your question: I think it is generally believed that jobs with manual labour often enable one to build things from start to finish or at least be responsible for a closed tangible process (like maybe being a coffee engineer) while information work rarely does.
I, for one, am not convinced that is the case and I would like to encourage you to at least look into possibilities that give you satisfaction while still being adequately paid (which manual labour is very rarely). As a physicist you have the best prerequisites one can imagine.
Overall I believe the amount of manual labour had little to do with my job satisfaction ever. For me it is more about building stuff that others find useful and I need to be involved in much of the process. If you never see the outcome of your work it's probably inevitable to find it pointless at some point. If you only ever deal with the outcome of others (like in sales) you might find it pointless as well (at least I did).
Coming back to your question: I think it is generally believed that jobs with manual labour often enable one to build things from start to finish or at least be responsible for a closed tangible process (like maybe being a coffee engineer) while information work rarely does.
I, for one, am not convinced that is the case and I would like to encourage you to at least look into possibilities that give you satisfaction while still being adequately paid (which manual labour is very rarely). As a physicist you have the best prerequisites one can imagine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055688