The Worst Job of the Century
I’m a journalist, as you know. I mean, I go to the scene of the crime, go into the bar, drink several liters of beer, and then sit down at my computer and make it all up. It’s exhausting work. We live on the edge. You never know if there’ll be too long a line at the bar, whether the bar will close earlier than expected, or whether the beer will suddenly run out. Years ago, I thought I had a terrible job until someone showed me an old list of the 200 best and worst jobs, which CareerCast used to publish annually, and I found that there was an even worse one: lumberjack. It was a mirage. The following year, “journalist” dropped to 200th place. Then the ranking disappeared, and we haven’t heard from it since. So I guess “journalist” is back to 199th place on the best and worst jobs list, and number 200 will be “job-ranking compiler for CareerCast.”
If you think about it, the authors of that study considered cutting down trees worse than writing for a newspaper. I bet they’ve never written for a newspaper. Severing your leg while playing at cutting a cigar with a lumberjack’s chainsaw isn’t any more painful than facing a blank page two hours before deadline at a print newspaper (in case you’ve forgotten what a printed newspaper was, it’s that thing your grandmother used to wrap fish in). (RELATED: When Newspapers Ruled Morning and Evening)
Journalism used to be risky. Although it doesn’t matter so much today, back in the day, if you made a mistake in a front-page headline, you could trigger a world war. And that’s a far cry from the risks faced by a lumberjack: however clumsy you are at cutting down trees, the biggest disaster you can cause is leaving the mountain looking like Kim Jong-un’s head. Besides, such a thing can only be seen from a satellite. I’m referring to the mountain, not the dictator’s head, which on a clear day can be seen with the naked eye from anywhere on the planet. (RELATED: Uncovered: The Power of the Citizen Journalist)
I have some friends who are writers, poets, and journalists. And then I have others who are actually paid for what they do, not for what they say they do. Pablo is a doctor. Tomás is a banker. Jorge is a pickpocket. And Julián, a special case, is the highest-paid of the lot: he’s the General Secretary to the Director General of the Local President of the National Advisory Committee of the EU’s Sub-State Observatory of Strategic Communication. Nobody knows what he does for a living, but his fold-out business card is quite impressive to door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen.
Journalism has the advantage that anyone can do it, and the disadvantage that anyone can do it. It’s true that there’s a big difference between a good report and a bad one, but the profession has spent two centuries trying to figure out whether a good article is one that leaves three gray-haired journalists who know a lot about journalism speechless, or one that leaves ten thousand ordinary readers speechless.
I also don’t know exactly why I waste my time analyzing my profession. I’m a journalist and a writer, and both professions no longer exist, swallowed up by AI, TikTok, and the crisis of Western civilization (I only wrote that last one to blame something that sounds epic). So I guess, technically, I’m not a journalist, but a gravedigger. Oh, and I’m also a sociologist. Or so says the university degree hanging in my office. A sociologist? Brilliant. Besides two professions that have disappeared, I have a third that never really existed. Sociology is the Bermuda Triangle of the academic world. (RELATED: Pensiveness in the Age of Algorithms)
That famous ranking also astonished me with its choice of the best profession: mathematician. The researchers claimed that mathematicians have extremely low stress levels and a wonderful work environment (seriously, can you get along with a disgusting, dirty, and repulsive square root?). But let’s admit it’s the complete opposite of a journalist’s environment, with its extremely high stress levels and a work atmosphere similar to what hippos find in a zoo when they have to share an enclosure with those monkeys with red asses who scream a lot — whose name I can’t remember.
And yet, personally, I’d rather cut down trees, participate in a reality show, meet with ten AI gurus, or endure any other form of modern torture than face a math problem. It’s one thing for journalism to be a problematic, filthy, exhausting, dangerous, miserable, and vile jungle, where, to top it all off, sometimes there’s no beer left, and quite another for me to actually want to get to work. That’s what computers, ChatGPT, and that old school friend who wore really thick glasses and couldn’t pronounce his “r” are for.
READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:
It’s Time to Go Back to School (Hopefully)