I’m just randomly packing my apartment up and contemplating life. What do you think is the most world’s important job? What job is the most noble? I think they are two different questions, as a noble job might not be the most important.
For me the most important job is being a responsible parent. Seems to make sense, if all our kids are raised well, the next generation could create a utopia (right?)
As for the most noble job, I have to admire volunteer work of any kind, but probably aid workers in third world nations. I value social work of any kind.
I think the world’s most important job is a really good primary care physician. Teachers can inspire you all they want but that doesn’t do much good if you have a serious health condition or are about to get one. This is true everywhere but especially important in developing countries. They can arrange solutions for everything from chronic diarrhea in children to malaria to heart problems to AIDS prevention.
I don’t think any occupation has a complete lock on the “noble” part. There are lawyers and financial advisors that do important pro bono for those in need and that can be much more important than a mediocre middle school teacher. Some social workers are incompetent and do more harm than good. I would say that any service professional that tries to help others, not out of greed, but just as a gift of their skills is noble.
Parenting isn’t a job right BTW anymore than any other life responsibility that you have chosen privately. People choose to have kids and the child had no say in the matter. It is the most important responsibility that you will ever had but looking at it as a job is completely screwed up. As Chris Rock said “That is what you are spossed to do!”.
Surely the most noble job is to be monarch? Both literally and metaphorically. To be responsible for everyone must be a huge burden. To see grinding poverty and know that you cannot directly help must be very depressing.
Auto mechanics, home builders and contractors (plumbers, electricians) and city or state public works (paving, road maintenance), and Teamsters. These are the people who keep the system that America is completely built on up and running. If all of these people stopped doing their job, this country would be back to the stone age. The service industry has come to dominate the American economy, but it is really just a paper tiger in my opinion. When you get down to it, what’s really important is the physical material that our society is built on, the literal nuts and bolts of it. The guy that fixes your air conditioner has more of a direct impact on your day to day life than any teacher, doctor, or astronaut.
ETA - and, of course, everyone involved in the processing and packaging of the food that we eat. These people, horrifically underpaid and overworked, totally un-acknowledged, are the reason why you don’t need to go outside and shoot rabbits or pick berries to feed your family.
All of this is a symptom of a larger issue which is the fact that modern Americans are completely separated and shielded from the “insides” of all of the creature comforts we take for granted.
Yep, just look at Toronto… less than a week and we see how important trash collection is. Public sanitation is an incredibly important foundation of our modern cities and way of life.
This is blatantly self-serving, of course, - but I’d argue Lawyers are probably a good pick for most “important” overall. Not to say that trash collectors, doctors, teachers, farmers, and so on aren’t important - they are, and crucially so.
But without the law, you can’t have any professions at all. Life is full of disputes, ranging from “Joe didn’t send the tractor after I paid for it” to “Joe killed my mother!” Absent mechanisms for resolving those disputes that nearly everyone views as legitimate, we’d be living in the state of nature, and life would be “savage, brutal, and short.” You can’t spend the first two or three decades of your life in school in an environment like that - let alone build a factory, discover medicines, and so on and so forth.
If we want to have people more highly specialized than self-sufficient hunter-gatherer types, then we need a civilization capable of supporting them. Civilization requires laws, and if those laws are going to be complex enough to suit the needs of a complex society, we need specialists to apply those laws.
I once got drunk and insisted that lawyers are nothing less than “physicians to the body politic - guarantors of the health of Civilization itself.” I tend to use flowery prose when I’m drunk, but I’ll stand by the sentiment.