Andrew Van Dam wrote in the Washington Post recently about the "happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs in America." Surprise, surprise. At the top of the list were folks engaged in extraction industries, including forestry and farming, enterprises associated with rural America. Here's the lede:
Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth. 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 thousands of 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.)
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While our friends the lumberjacks and farmers do the least-stressful work, their jobs are well-known to be particularly perilous, and they report the highest levels of pain on the job. To puzzle out why, we zoomed out to look at activity categories beyond work.
The most meaningful and happiness-inducing activities were religious and spiritual, which doesn’t tell us much about farming or forestry — at least not as it’s commonly practiced in the United States. But the second-happiest activity — sports, exercise and recreation — helps crack the case.
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That adjacency to nature forms the core of forestry’s appeal. Mike Wetherbee is now board president of the Maine Forest and Logging Museum and marketing manager of his wife Alissa’s timber-sports barnstorming crew, the Axe Women Loggers of Maine. But his long journey into forest work began on a bridge while driving home from a seasonal job near the coastal scrub forests of the Everglades.
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