I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine recently who noted that her husband's trade magazine (he's a cinematographer) doesn't have ads for the 1,001 non-cinematographer things its readers could do with their cinematography skills.  Lawyers' journals, she noted, are filled with ads for alternate careers.  

In a moment of "productive procrastination" (blogging) I conducted my own completely unreliable and unscientific survey of professionals' relative degrees of unhappiness.  I did this by googling the term "unhappy" along with the names of the professions that came most readily to my mind.     

No surprise, there are more than twenty five hundred entries for unhappy lawyers.  No other profession even comes close.

Philosophers, who make a living deeply pondering difficult questions like "what is the meaning of a life that inevitably ends in death" have only 901 "unhappy" entries.  Doctors, who surely see their fair share of unbearable human suffering, google in at 776.  Artists, whose ability to make a living is dodgy at best, have only 716 entries and actors, whose lives are controlled by forces as fickle as the weather, come onstage at 602. 

There are unhappy executives it seems, but only at 658 entries, after which the fall in unhappiness listings tumbles precipitiously.  There are 389 unhappy managers, 284 unhappy accountants, 141 unhappy professors, 127 unhappy bankers, 70 unhappy dentists (with all that drilling?), 58 unhappy entrepreneurs, 29 unhappy journalists, 28 unhappy chefs, 27 unhappy librarians, 19 unhappy surgeons, 4 unhappy psychiatrists, one unhappy social worker and no unhappy cinematographers!

I won't "do the math" to determine whether the Google Unhappiness Index is related in any way to income.  Obviously, it's not.  After all, there are only 643 entries for unhappy prisoners!  But I suppose they don't have much access to the internet.

If I've missed one of your favorite professions, please pass its Google Unhappiness Index rating along to me.

And don't despair.  A new member of the Secret Society of Happy Lawyers -- Lawsanga -- has checked in with an acronym for happiness success -- check it out!

And do also check out this extraordinary resource -- How Harmful is Happiness?