50 Best Jobs List Inspires and Disappoints in Turn

Money magazine recently published a list of the 50 best jobs in America, based on pay, job growth and quality of life. While our legal team says we can't recommend all young people kill themselves, after reading this list we feel like anyone about to enter the job market should adopt a value system that completely rejects the accumulation of material goods.

What we're trying to say is that most of the 50 "best" jobs in America don't look like much fun, unless you're into touching sick people or doing mind-numbingly boring IT tasks. In fact, if these are the 50 best jobs in America, the only reasonable explanation is that every other job in the country involves the handling of excrement.

OK, maybe we're being too harsh. Some of the jobs on the list weren't that bad. Below, we've listed five of these jobs we'd actually be into (and added five more jobs that we think should have appeared).

Jobs from the list we're actually into:

College Professor. A beacon of light at number three on the list. If you liked being in college, you'll probably like being a professor. That said, you should also probably tattoo the school's fraternization policies to the insides of your eyelids.

Securities Trader. Yeah, you'd be one of the jerks who ruined the economy. Still, these guys get paid whether the market goes up or down. If you have to be a jerk, be a rich jerk.

Quality Control Engineer. Sure it sounds excessively dorky, but so do a lot of jobs on the list. And this one comes with a kind of King Dork authority. From the sound of it, all you'd have to do is strut around peeking over people's shoulders, saying, "Nope. Not good enough."

Pharmaceutical Sales Representative. Maybe hawking Viagra to urologists isn't the best gig in the world. But have you ever seen the female talent in the Pharmaceutical Sales Representative ranks? Let's just say all your single friends will constantly pester you about when your next work happy hour is.

Lawyer. We used to think being a lawyer would be brutal and soul crushing. But after reading this list, it turns out life is brutal and soul crushing anyway, so you might as well get paid and wear nice suits.

Jobs that should have been included:

Video Game Tester. What's odd is that in all of Money's exaltation of jobs like "software product manager," they don't even mention the greatest possible software-related job: the video game tester. (Or maybe that's what the "quality control engineer" does.)

Official Bikini Inspector. What? We saw it on a T-shirt once, so it must be legitimate.

Sports Announcer/Talk Show Host. Even in your wildest dreams, nobody is going to pay you to play sports. However, as long as Tim McCarver is still spewing his "wisdom," you can make a very good argument that you should be paid to talk about sports.

Bartender at a Tropical Resort. Come on, how can you beat that? (Yes, "Cocktail" made an impression on us when we were young.)

Reality TV Star. Not only do reality TV stars make good scratch, but in what other career do obstacle courses feature so prominently? Will this growth industry eventually reach critical mass? Probably. But at the rate we're going it looks like even a 1:1 ratio of reality TV stars to non-reality TV stars isn't out of the question. The point is, when they start casting "America's Top Procrastinator" you want to be ready.

What job do you think is the best in America?

From Around the Web:
Will Work for Cold Cereal (Burbia)
Fantasy Telemarketer. (Adult Swim)