I HEAR YOU FRIEND.....
it is certinaly not the same as when we were kids doing what we could to earn a dollar....i remember helping the night clerk at the 7-11 mop the floors for an icee...lol...we weren’t to good for anything....from your story you and i are about the same age...never did the paper route but did mow lawns...would even help some people at the local stables brush down and walk their horses from time to time just so i could get some free rides...lol...
A guy in my high school class was working for the county highway crew. He was lying about his age, just like me. He was digging post holes by hand in the hot sun, to put up new road signs. And that was on a good day. On a bad day, he was out scraping roadkill off the road with a flat-bladed coal shovel.
I guess that was one job I was “too good” to do. But it was probably the only one. In the winter they had him driving a snow plow and spreading salt, in a Highway Department truck at the age of 16. With today’s youth, that’s fiction too weird to be believed.