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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3371 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

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If you could maintain your current standard of living with any job, but you had to have a job, what would you choose to do for work?

Without a doubt the best job I ever had was being a preschool camp counselor. It made me want to have kids of my own. Some of the boys started dressing like me by the end of the summer

I sometimes fantasize about being a biology or history teacher at a fancy boarding school

The guy who writes the Lexington column in The Economist, or really any kind of prominent writer/intellectual that gets invited to go to panels and opine on whatever. btw buy my latest book

There are plenty of minimal "jobs" that pay at or below minimum wage and would mostly leave me free to pursue my hobbies, but that feels like cheating. If I have to have a real job that takes up 35+ hours a week of my time, it's hard to think of something I'd like doing more than the job I'm already doing (suing the government). Ideally I'd like to do only the fun parts like formulating legal strategies, arguing in court, and mentoring the younger lawyers, without the drudgery of stuff like timekeeping or client development, but the former can't exist without the latter.

Can I say my current job but with better hours?

I miss tutoring. I was never able to earn enough income to live the lifestyle I have today - so that's quite the pipe dream.

I'd love to see if other people find my research skills valuable. My current job does not, even if I'm finding potential clients they've never heard of before.

Thr common thread I keep pulling at is that I don't mind working, but other people don't seem to value the work I want to do. And that's quite demoralizing.

I've debated between two paths:

First would be taking a software gig with some ideological value behind it. But that's not always clear. Would that be Abel Police to help reduce anarcho-tyranny? Helping the Libertarian party elevate its technology backbone? The former is enabling a semi-automatic police state, the latter is supporting a bunch of buffoons who can't engage in realpolitk, but they're the first things that come to mind. Some folks I know with a similar ideological bent are still in crypto (!) but I'm behind enough on the tech curve there it may be tough.

The second would be returning to social/services labor. I've already seen people mention bartending or bike delivery, and if the latter were possible I'd definitely give it a shot. Even this is fraught though. The community bike mechanics who help serve the poor with transportation also can't help themselves from being leftist freaks at the same time, and serving coffee (another fringe interest) would have the same shit going on.

Oiling up bikini models for photo shoots

Would you believe that's not as enjoyable as you might think?

I would do my best to power through it.

That's what I told myself, but believe me when I tell you that aerosolized baby oil in your eyes and lungs makes it hard to appreciate the rest of the job.

Good solution here would be to use food-grade mineral oil free of scents and vitamins. I am available nights and weekends.

Mask and goggles weren't an option?

When you get a chance like that, you don't wait for PPE - you seize it.

I think I would need first-hand in addition to second-hand evidence

I might need to sit out a garden leave period soon in between jobs, so I have actually been thinking about this. Current favorites is bike delivery for the "get very fit and just listen to audiobooks all day long" aspect, or bartending for the social aspects since I am really tired of the extreme tech autism work environments.

Evening shift security guard at a place that’s unlikely to experience trouble—say, for example, a library.

This isn't exactly the answer to your question, but in high school our family business did a large renovation job at a local university, and afterward there was a fairly simple maintenance job that required periodic observation for 10 hours a day seven days a week but only a few hours of actual activity. Because it was a university job, it was "prevailing wage" meaning laborers were paid full union wages, which iirc at the time was $32/hr for this field, including overtime it was a few grand a week for this low-work low-skill job.

So because my dad didn't want to pay a real employee that much money for no real work, I spent most of the summer hanging out on campus, making absurd money (some of which I was even actually paid!), and in between morning and afternoon and evening rounds that took up about half the day, I wandered around the academic libraries and just took books off shelves and read all day. If anyone wondered who I was they never asked, I was just a sort of sixteen year old academic hermit in work boots. I worked a lot of hours but I spend all of it reading, and it didn't matter that I had no weekends because I just spent all night running around with my friends anyway.

I often say if I could have kept that weird little job forever, I never would have even gone to a real college. I got everything I wanted out of life right there.

I would choose my current career in IT, but without clankers. Setting aside debates about efficacy, if my career turns into prompting clankers I'm going to hate it. I got into this field because I actually like programming, but right now the industry seems to be trying to take that joy away.

High-stakes negotiator.

Actually tried to pursue this but discovered that 'hired gun negotiators' aren't really a thing.

Senior estate agents are "hired gun negotiators". (The junior agents who arrange viewings and such like are their minions/apprentices).

M&A bankers are arguably doing the same work with businesses instead of real estate. Again, you are a minion/apprentice until you make MD level when you become a hired gun negotiator.

I'd be a software developer, like I am now.

Model playtester for Anthropic or SpaceX would probably be a lot of fun. Former for the cutting edge stuff, latter for the uncensored stuff.

Something artistic is my first thought. Creative writing and painting soothes the soul, but is hard to justify doing as a job.

Professional athlete is good for the physical benefits while being fun and stimulating, although potentially dangerous depending on the sport.

Museum curator would also be really cool. That seems like a good way to be constantly learning new things and getting in touch with interesting people. I like learning and communicating, so I actually think that could suit me pretty well. Just a shame those jobs are so competitive and rare.

Fiction editor, any medium. Or any editing, really, beyond simple proofreading.

Assuming getting hired/started wasn't an issue—some ideas came to mind for the quality of life and/or extracurricular benefits, and since current standard of living is guaranteed:

  • Drug dealer
  • Club promoter
  • Nightclub owner
  • Hooters (or adjacent type restaurant) owner
  • Male cheerleader
  • Hollywood actor
  • Professional athlete in a glamourous but not CTE-inducing sport (e.g., NBA, MLB, EPL)
  • Tenured professor in the soft sciences (e.g., communications, psychology, sociology) at a school like ASU or FSU
  • Corporate sales role of any kind (since I could then just not do shit)
  • DEI bureaucrat in government, academia, or corporate (since I could then just not do shit, or deploy subterfuge from within)

Tenured professor in the soft sciences (e.g., communications, psychology, sociology) at a school like ASU or FSU

I, too, have seen some of those documentaries.

Hooters (or adjacent-type restaurant) owner

Fun fact: Hooters declared bankruptcy just a year ago.

Crafter and artist, if I could have a studio space during work hours, and not have to maintain the maniacal consistency of actual professionals who make my current income, instead shifting between different kinds of projects.

I'd have a sawmill.

I'd take my old job back, driving for a locally-owned Doordash (We were in business before Uber/Doordash where I live, but they eventually wiped us out.).

It was so easy that it barely felt like a job, literally being paid to drive around in circles listening to music, chat with bartenders, gossip with dispatch, and do some light auto repair on the side (I was the guy who got called before one of our drivers resorted to taking their car to a real shop.). Perfect barfly hours (start at 11AM, done when happy hour ends and the olds start going home), and when you're done for the day, you're done for the day, no responsibilities aside from maintaining a roadworthy car, not getting a DUI, and being ready by 11.

The kick in the ass is that adjusted for inflation I made the same to better money (more money but no health insurance; I made $50K/year back in 2016 which is roughly $70K a year now) driving around slinging Chinese and sushi 10 years ago than I do now at my real job (logistics coordinator at a trucking company). Covid, post-covid inflation, and competition from the big national companies ruined all that but it was a fun gravy train while it lasted. I'm hoping for a promotion soon or at least a fat bonus soon to fix or at least salve the money problem and I don't hate my current job, but God it sucks in comparison. Whiny/stupid drivers (Most of them are decent, but the stupid and whiny take most of your time.), insane/delusional customers, inconsistent freight levels, constantly getting fucked by tank washes, and reams of paperwork. I'm on call 24/7 and have been woken up before 7AM by a driver on four of the last seven days.

Unexpectedly high pay is common for jobs with no growth prospects right? Compensating you for that

That's funny. "Pizza delivery" is close to the top of my list.

Ah, I was about to say parts driver but you beat me to the punch. 12–8 weekdays. The perfect job for getting drunk every night while in college. That job paid $8/hour 20 years ago, which comes out to $13.21 in today's money, though the guys who had been doing it forever made comparable money to the other shitty jobs at the time that didn't require college education, and they didn't require working in an industrial facility. The best days were the ones where we'd have to drop off a trade-in at the auction, which required two of us driving an hour away and taking the least efficient route possible, which may or may not have included stopping at the end of a dead-end street for a nap. The one truck had satellite radio in it, too, which was luxury at the time.

Would this require like a commute and minimal hours per week?

Like I'm sure one of the obvious answers would be some sort of government/bureaucratic remote sinecure where you don't actually have to do more than an hour or two a week

Let's assume roughly as many hours as you're working now.

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