>He treated it like poverty tourism, like a middle-class youth group "missions trip" to build huts for third-world natives.

He literally didn't though if you read the piece, he's very aware of the nature of a rich guy going to work a manual job

>"I am not going to bill an Amazon job as some sort of upper-middle-class panacea, something you go do just like you go enroll in survivalist camps or silent retreats. The job can be dehumanizing, physically wearing if not outright painful, and mind-numbingly boring if you can’t invent little games for yourself while lifting 300 boxes an hour for eleven hours straight. The job has been incredibly rewarding to me, far beyond what I had expected. It saved me from a downward spiral that I just could not get myself out of. But it’s no dream job. I want out of there as soon as Peak ends; I do not want to stay a minute longer."

I grew up blue collar, I'm not offended by this at all. Is he supposed to be categorically excluded from ordinary jobs just because he lucked out in life, like some reverse class segregation? This isn't Jack Dorsey meditating in Myanmar while there's riots on the streets or Zuckerberg touring Middle America, it's just some dude who felt depressed and changed his job up to get a different experience.

> He treated it like poverty tourism, like a middle-class youth group "missions trip" to build huts for third-world natives.

"mission trips" are not real poverty tourism though. Kids don't go live in real poverty on those trips. They live in hotels, eat prepared food, so on.

The author did move 300 boxes per hour for a whole month.

To be fair, in the episode where he details the tendonitis, he spends a lot of time describing the ways that the AMZN warehouse bureaucracy is designed to abuse their workers (delay their claims, structure work alternatives to be impossible to accept, etc,) and reflects on how this affects those who rely on their warehouse jobs for, e.g., family health insurance.