Career Choices

Some time ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the best and worst careers one could have:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123119236117055127.html

By their criteria, I'm not doing so well.

-Environment: Ranges from luxury hotels to working outside in January in pants and a corset

-Income: Just over the national average, which would be more of an accomplishment if I didn't have three university degrees and a mountain of student debt to pay off.

-Employment outlook: If I know what I'll be doing and how much money I'll be making 24 hours from now it is indeed a good and lucky day.

-Physical demands include dancing, eating fire, hauling luggage and boa constrictors around the country. Also the aforementioned outside-in-one's-pants.

-Stress: See "employment outlook".

These are the standards set out by the article, which does not actually inquire into one's job satisfaction. This problem becomes clear when practitioners of one of the "worst" professions, lumberjacks, insist they love their job. And likewise, I cannot believe that income is everything or that physical demands are negative. Yesterday I danced to the point of exhaustion, but I got an endorphin high, made a roomful of people happy, had £100 of tips thrown over me, wore a series of luxurious and beautiful costumes, interceded in a dispute between two men vying to buy me champagne (solution: we all sit down at one table and drink both their bottles together), and was told ad nauseam that I am extremely beautiful and that I dance well. I then slept until noon, went to a costume-sewing social, and read a chunk of Jan Assman's Moses the Egyptian and learned about mnemohistory. I can't really complain.

What I dislike about the Wall Street Journal's criteria are that they suggest ideal work should be stress-free and physically easy. While extremes of stress, environment and physical danger/strain have negative consequences on one's health, surely that does not mean the complete absence of stress and physical motion is necessarily desirable. For example, stressful situations at work may also come with adrenaline and endorphin rushes (I'm an endorphin junkie to such an extent that more than 24 hours without an endorphin rush gives me a full-on existential crisis and generally makes me a pain in the ass). And stressful jobs - surgery, bomb disposal - often come with a great sense of achievement.

It's also helpful to have a job that people perceive as important or interesting. One of my best friends is an investment banker and it's often a social stumbling block that may well lower his life and job satisfaction. Another friend who composes music makes far less money and job security but has the social reward of everyone finding her profession laudable and interesting.

Perhaps it is possible to quantify and rank the value of jobs, but it would be more interesting if the article took additional factors into account, as well as a worker's job satisfaction.