When I was REALLY young, the job I always thought I wanted was the guys who walked around in the city parks picking up trash, with a big sack over their shoulder and a stick w/ a nail on the end. Just thought it looked so pleasant - strolling about the park, jabbing at things w/ a pointy stick.
Just to think - I coulda had THAT job, instead of ending up a lawyer! :rolleyes:
I have a happy job- playing and teaching music. Oh sure, there’s low points, but it’s mostly happy. I just wish I were a happier person.
Bolding mine.
This is something that you can control. It is not easy, OK for some it is easy, but it was/is not for me. I get up every morning and consciously choose to be happy that morning.
Letting the BS that comes along get to me is not allowed. For me this has been work! However, the more I practice this choice the easier it becomes.
Then at noon, I again choose to be happy. Again it is work, yet the work is worth the lack of stress.
Again in the evening, I choose to be happy. This is easier, as I choose what I spend my time doing.
I choose to not be stressed out by anything that I can not control. If my bosses are making impossible demands & they are unapproachable, I find a new-to-me job. OTOH, If there is a chance that the situation will change soon, I may stick it out for, at most, 6 months.
This is where my choice to take four years off from school after graduating from High School comes in handy. I learned then how to find jobs & I can now find a job almost anywhere. This is also the time that I determined that life is too short to work at a job I hate.
As I grow older, I see from the perspective of being the more experienced man I am. I can now see what I should spend my time, effort & emotions on.
Rght now I only have one job, as I just got laid off from my seasonal job. I do not need the seasonal job, but the extra money is nice & I love the work that I do. It is a service to my community.
I also umpire softball & baseball. Again I love this job. It is also seasonal. My last game for this season is today. I do not count umpiring as a job, I enjoy it too much for it to be a job.
OTOH, I love my “real” job as well. I get paid to work on antique machinery! What others do as a hobby I get paid for! Yes, it does not pay as well as the high stress jobs, but my happiness is not for sale.
My “retirement job”, I hope, will be working on antique airplanes.
Not a new or original observation by any means, but anyone notice that so far the happy(er) jobs seem to mostly be lower paying jobs?
I was happy once, about 7 years ago, for about 6 seconds. I kinda wish it hadn’t happened, because now I know what it feels like. 
Just to be oppositional. I love my job everyone I work with tends to be happy and passionate and my job is so much fun it is hard for people to learn what ai do and not spend hours asking me questions and listening to my stories about work. I design and build distilleries, breweries and wineries and also consult on product development and running of distilleries.
My pay is more then I’ve made at any point in my life though not quite as steady as when I was a manger in the oil field. I enjoy the lack of steadiness too though because this week and next I’m taking off to work on my house and I get a ton of time with my wife and kids.
Ah, yer not bein oppositional. I know for a fact that there are jobs that pay anywhere from well to OMG that make the doers of those jobs very happy.
But, you hit on it though. Your job allows you to have a good quality life that is not entirely connected to how much money you make.
I’d guess that those of us that work lower paying jobs have three things, it is work we like doing, we probably mostly get along with who ever we work with, mostly, and we all seem to have managed to not let work take over our entire mental/emotional living space, in part because even though we may not be making good let alone OMG money, we know that the bills will be paid, we have some sort of feeling of security.
Maybe you don’t know where or what project you will be doing next month or whatever, but you still have that modicum of security because I’d guess you have some amount of money squirrelled away and you know you can survive for some period until you find a new income stream.
I’ve had a few happy jobs, long ago…
I have a happy job. In 2017 I left my career as a technical writer (which was a a good job, paid well, and had great benefits and co-workers) to write novels full-time. My spouse still has a good job in IT (he’s a QA engineer at Apple) which has great benefits, and he supported my decision to follow my dream. Every day I’m happy to get up and go to work. Haven’t looked back even once.
Mine can be quite happy, it depends on the levels of idiocy involved. I’m a consultant in IT; I learn my clients’ processes, propose improvements, test the new processes and eventually get to teach them to people. My direct targets are people who work in Quality Control, Maintenance or Production; often they’re relatively uneducated and very fearful of the changes my team brings. That moment when someone who’d been terrified of losing his job due to being unable to understand the new processes realizes that he does in fact understand them just fine? Absolutely priceless. Sometimes the level of wonder on their part and corresponding joy in mine is barely one step below a toddler discovering snow 
My job is not happy. Working in a prison delivering health care is daunting, and filled with people whose perceived medical ‘needs’ are not actual needs, nor even beneficial to them if provided, but they cannot accept that their desires are not being granted.
On the other hand, I do benefit a lot of folks who have legitimate medical needs which had been going unmet before they met me. I can take satisfaction in that, and also satisfaction in performing my duty to my patients, regardless of whether they’re satisfied with my care and education about their health situation.
I am one of your faithful readers
I play with doggies when their rich owners are away. It’s the happiest possible job.
For a bit I thought it would be nice to be a parking lot attendant, the kind that sits in the little shack all day, parks cars and takes money, but I ended up doing the lawyer thing too. It’s been a bit over 15 years and I’m ready to move on, or at least find a different area to explore. It’s had its moments, but I’m restless.
I was a professor and research mathematician and it was a happy job. Marking tests was not, but most of the rest was. The research part is what I have continued to pursue in the nearly 20 years since I retired and I do that for no pay, so you better believe it makes me happy.
I think I have a happy job, mostly.
I work retail in a store that caters to people that own horses (Dover Saddlery, for the horsey among us). The job can be irritating, or dull sometimes, but for the most part it’s people buying things that make them happy, or to make the animal that they love happy. Sometimes they are buying supplies for a sick or injured horse, but the love is still there, and the passion for the sport. Totally shallow, perhaps, but there are a fair number of folk who are also part of rescues and therapy groups, and seeing parents happily fostering a love of animals and outdoor sport in their kids is great, especially when it can serve to stave off boys/drugs/semi-delinquent behavior, and teach girls to be tough, athletic, and self sufficient.
I like my job 
I’m in Afghanistan to reopen our office after a suicide attack destroyed our previous one, so no.
No, I don’t, not anymore. It may change, but I doubt it.
Was that right before your wings melted?
My job is hella depressing for the most part, but it makes me happy, for the most part. I defend parents when social workers take their kids away. The system is brutally unfair and everything that’s awful about government–indifferent, inefficient, incompetent, etc. Some of my clients aren’t the nicest people either. And I lose a lot, no matter how hard I work, which is hard on the ego. But every once in a while, I get to see justice served and a child go home to a loving family, and I can live off that feeling for months.
When I win custody for my client in a paternity case or a contested guardianship, that feeling that the child is not going to be living with their drug-addled and/or abusive parent is a good one that can last for a spell.