Your therapist’s happiness level rises when you visit her couch. Firefighters are delighted to help you get Kitty out of a tree. Sins to confess to your priest or minister? He’s tickled to hear them.

Psychologist, firefighter, and clergy are included in the list of the “10 happiest jobs” based on data collected via the General Social Survey of the National Organization for Research at the University of Chicago, reports the Christian Science Monitor. “Since experts say that social interaction drives job satisfaction, it makes sense that clergy are happiest of all,” Christian Science Monitor writes. “Social interaction and helping people [is a] combination that’s tough to beat for job happiness.”

Is your job on the list?

You Work Too Hard. Work finds a way to slip under our front doors and into our personal lives. We check email while making dinner and return phone calls on the weekend; we think about our jobs as we’re falling asleep at night and when we’re washing our hair in the morning. It’s no secret that Americans are overworked. What’s surprising is how overworked we are—and how much corporations benefit from our around-the-clock labor.

According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, corporate profits are up 22 percent since 2007, report Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery in Mother Jones, even as jobs are cut and American workers put in longer hours for static salaries. What were once manageable 40-hour-a-week appointments have morphed into “superjobs,” overladen with increased tasks when staff is downsized. Read more …

Save for the country’s top executives, almost everyone working in American business is doing more with less. So when serious journalists—an inherently cynical lot in the first place—grumble publically about budget cuts, story quotas, and the pressure to blog or tweet, it makes sense that people outside of the industry aren’t moved to sympathy. Not only that, but we are bombarded with so much information online, in print, and over the airwaves, that it sometimes feels as though the world would keep spinning if, in a worst-case scenario, a few reporters had to find another way to make a living.

The problem is, more and more journalists and college graduates are forgoing the trenches to pursue a different career path. Instead of reporting the news, they’re working to help manipulate it as public relations specialists. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in fact, in 1980 there were .45 PR people and .36 journalists per every 100,000 workers. As of 2008, that number had shifted radically. There are now .90 PR people per 100,000 workers and just .25 journalists. As Columbia Journalism Review reports in its May-June 2011 issue, that’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped and better financed to influence what the public sees and hears. Read more …