Top Five Easiest Jobs in the World

The hands down winner for the man with the easiest job in the world. For between 60 and 120 seconds per week (during the regular television season) he jabbers on about whatever happens to come into his mind as the end-piece on CBS's long-running and generally esteemed news magazine, "60 Minutes." A former highly regarded journalist, he is now a kindly yet curmudgeon, offering a frequently smirkingly cynical after word on one of the last remaining real reality shows. His content is inconsequential and is apparently approved by no one. He simply free associates about something or nothing 36-38 times a year and gets paid exceedingly well for it. What on Earth could be easier?

2. The Weatherman/woman

What could be a better job than getting paid well to guess, with a tacit understanding that your guesses will be right about 35% of the time and pretty far off base for the rest? While this would be considered a good performance (batting) average for a professional baseball player, most other walks of life would require a higher degree of correctness than that. Would you want to go to a surgeon whose patients survived only 35% of the time, or to a financial adviser who made money for only 35% of their clients? Of course not.

To add insult to injury, all weather forecasters (Meteorologists, if they happen to have been college educated in the activity) draw their data from the self same source - The US Weather Service. The variations come down to how they dress, how they sound and their personalities. Their guesses are no better than anyone elses, yet they get paid quite well for making them. Easy.

3. Restaurant Critic

Get paid to eat and then write about your experience. For a literate person, not an especially difficult or challenging line of work. The object is to build readership so as to acquire 'juice' (influence) in the local restaurant community. Like all critics (including those focusing on literature, music, theater or film,) each one represents only their own, ever increasingly idiosyncratic and self-important point of view.

Getting paid to eat well knowing that the owners and chefs know who you are and will give you the very best they can possibly muster in hopes of obtaining a favorable and quotable review is a pretty easy, posh, filling and ego gratifying way to make a living.

It's all gravy.

4. Writing an Advice Column: Especially For The Lovelorn

Again, the only real qualifications are literacy and opportunity. People who really need help do not generally seek it by writing to faceless columnists who may or may not ever read - let alone publish and respond directly to a question or concern. The writers are as equally exhibitionist as are the columnists. It isn't advice they seek - it is the satisfaction of having written to someone. By the same token, the advices giver with no special qualifications to offer personal advice isn't in the business of helping people at all. S/he is in the entertainment business, gathering up as large a voyeuristic audience as is possible.

5. Being the Child of a Successful Actor or Musician

This is the theatrical version of 'being born with a silver spoon in your mouth.' The success and celebrity of the parent automatically opens doors for their progeny - any objectively superior talent (or lack thereof) notwithstanding. Who has not watched or heard a professional performance and thought , "Gee - Even I could do better than that!?" Surprise is that this might be precisely true. However, lacking the right bloodline and access to the right introductions and opportunities you are a lot less likely to get the chance to show what you could do.

It is difficult to beat the ultimate benefits of unearned luck and familial connections in the quest for success and celebrity.

There are many other easy jobs in the world. Being the construction crew member who gets paid Union scale for standing twenty yards down the road from the real work holding a sign up to approaching cars that says "Slow;" Being the lifeguard at a community pool on a cloudy day when there is no one in the water; Parking cars for rich folks at parties and drawing salary and benefits as a supervisor in most public systems would also qualify had I the time or inclination to write them up. Most of you will understand exactly what I am talking about.

But I'll stick with the Top Five.