Study Reveals the Happiest, Least Stressful Jobs in America

"Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth," writes the Washington Post. "Or at least they think they do. Farmers, too."Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness - and lowest levels of self-reported stress - of any major industry category, according to our analysis of more than 13,000 time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey. (Additional reporting sharpened our focus on lumberjacks and foresters, but almost everyone who works on farms or in forests stands out.) The time-use survey typically asks people to record what they were doing at any given time during the day. But in four recent surveys, between 2010 and 2021, they also asked a subset of those people - more than 13,000 of them - how meaningful those activities were, or how happy, sad, stressed, pained and tired they felt on a six-point scale.... [H]appiness and meaning aren't always correlated. Heath-care and social workers rate themselves as doing the most meaningful work of anybody (apart from the laudable lumberjacks), but they rank lower on the happiness scale. They also rank high on stress. The most stressful sectors are the industry including finance and insurance, followed by education and the broad grouping of professional and technical industries, a sector that includes the single most stressful occupation: lawyers. Together, they paint a simple picture: A white collar appears to come with significantly more stress than a blue one. The Post credits "adjacency to nature" as boosting the happiness in forestry-related professions (as well as many recreational activities). The Post spoke to one forestry advocate who even argued that "Forestry forces you to work on a slower time scale. It pushes you to have a generational outlook."

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