Wait... Your second paragraph is jarringly different from the first. How do they relate?

And how do either of them relate to statistical literacy in the United States?

Statistical literacy, or any literacy for that matter, requires hard work that is seen as a normal way of life. When machines do that hard work for us, it is no longer seen as a normal thing, but some unnecessary hard work (when we have cars, why walk 20 miles? And we have machines that do statistics).

Just like how those college kids saw my work as horrifically weird hard work, while I saw it as a normal thing.

My interpretation is how the risks (statistics) of those job functions are more known, people choose to avoid them. But the people that are-the-statistic don't necessarily agree with or understand those statistics.

For example, if OP is a coal miner that hasn't had health issues yet, they may choose to discount statistics that declare x% of coal miners have negative health outcomes.

This feels correct. It's why they included the tidbit about their youth, they're saying their job was better than the life they grew with.

I think they are saying as information (statistics) are known about the risks of those jobs, less people are interested in performing those jobs.

Are you a bot? Are you sure that you are answering in the thread that you meant to?

Nope. It's a true story. And how it relates to thread is given below in another of my comments. "Things change with time" should have given you some relation. Statistics is seen by the current generation as hard work, rightly so, due to availability of easier ways of dealing with it.

Oh we used to dream of only walking 20 miles a day.

We used to get up at 3am half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison then walk FOURTY miles uphill to school then when we got home our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife

Luxury!