THE CAPTAIN REPORTS:
Last Friday, January 20, 2023, the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker penned the following:
"Want to be happy? Then don’t be a lawyer."
Reprinted below are some excerpts from her story. You can read the entire piece here.
“It may surprise few that lawyers are the unhappiest people on the planet, at least when it comes to their jobs. This is according to lawyers themselves and is the conclusion of a recent analysis by The Post of data on America’s happiest and unhappiest workers.
Chalk up lawyers’ malaise to high levels of stress and a lack of “meaningfulness” in their work. This doesn’t mean all lawyers dislike their jobs, but data don’t lie (even if some lawyers sometimes do). This analysis was done by Andrew Van Dam, who, speaking of meaningful employment, delves into vast databanks to answer questions posed by readers. In this case, he examined thousands of journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey to find out who’s happy and who isn’t.”
Beneath all this data is perhaps a more important question: What is happiness?
As a teenager, I once asked my lawyer-father if he was happy. Pursing his lips, he thought for a moment, then said, “For some people, happiness is the absence of stress.” I assumed he was referring to himself. He also said in another conversation that he thrived on stress, from which I concluded that life is often contradictory. His answer, nonetheless, was consistent with the survey findings — the less the stress, the greater the happiness.
So, who are the happy devils who love their jobs? Envelope, please. And the winners are: lumberjacks, foresters and farmers. The common denominator among the three is obvious. They all work primarily outdoors, soloists communing with nature far removed from the white-collar stresses of desk life and paperwork.
What doesn’t show up in the analysis are any metaphysical reasons such workers are happy. I would submit that it’s because they spend their time close to nature. In my experience, living attuned to Earth’s cycles and seasons — and I don’t mean shopping for outerwear online — has a salubrious effect on body, mind and soul. Thus, Tibetan monks build monasteries on remote mountaintops. Henry David Thoreau lived alone for two years in a tiny shack he built overlooking Walden Pond. And many people find a renewed sense of self and purpose through wilderness programs such as Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School. Nature works wonders.
City dwellers might say that they experience nature in urban ways — by spending a day in a park, perhaps. Or, on vacation, they get to observe the ebbs and flows of oceans, rivers and lakes. To see wildlife, they can go to a zoo. But such bystander adaptations sidestep the essential point: It’s one thing to observe the natural world; it’s quite another to be a part of it."
So, instead of conducting a poll like has been done a few times before on this Blog, let’s open this up in the Comment section.
Please Comment and answer the following questions:
1. “It may surprise few that lawyers are the unhappiest people on the planet, at least when it comes to their jobs”. ARE YOU UNHAPPY WITH YOUR JOB?
2. For how many years have you been an attorney?
3. Are you a government attorney or in private practice?
4. What percent of your practice is criminal versus civil/other?
5. How many weeks of vacation do you take a year where you actually leave town spending your vacation somewhere else?
6. Do you find that the work you do is meaningful?
Have at it.
Captain4Justice@gmail.com