The Most Fun Jobs In The Entire World

Many people out there would tell you that the internet has ruined our collective capacity to interact with culture. Do people still read the classics? Does anyone really have the patience to stand and study a great painting long enough for it to reveal itself?

But new forms of media have always attracted opposition. When novels took over from poetry as the major western literary form, books were thought to be hazardous to health, particularly that of women, whom, it was believed, would suffer from overactive imaginations and be unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality (per The New York Times). When television become the norm for average households, parents were warned that the box would ruin children's attention spans, that they would suffer from "square eyes," and that the television, which Pressbooks calls "perhaps the most culturally influential medium in human history," was inferior to all that came before it, such as printed material and the radio.

So too with the internet, which many critics have said offers an abundance of information with no depth, with content becoming shorter and shallower, and everything reducible to the form of a mere meme. But, for those of us who are "very online," the tide seems to finally have turned, to the point at which internet culture is finally becoming respectable. Vice reports on the plethora of academics studying memes in the same way they have works of literature or other artforms for generations, while a separate Vice report claims that memes have now become such a respectable medium that they have recently been exhibited in real-life museums. So now you don't have to keep your favorite memes to Tumblr; you can curate them in the knowledge you're making a major contribution to world culture.

We, as humans, are natural escape artists: we practice escapism every time we immerse ourselves in a game for hours on end or binge-watch a whole show in one sitting. Even many of the movies and shows we love — from "The Shawshank Redemption" to "Prison Break" — have escape as a theme, while escape rooms have become a popular attraction in many cities around the world.

But imagine if your job involved breaking out of — or, often, into — some of the world's most secure buildings (with the foreknowledge of the people running the place, of course). Wouldn't that be something? Well, that job actually exists, and its title is "penetration tester." According to Wired, penetration testers are hired by organizations such as jails, secure units, banks, and so on, to see whether their own security systems are up to scratch. Per Vice, some organizations even invite parkour experts to see if with their skills they can get out of some of the world's most secure buildings. Sounds fun, right?

However, there is a downside: that, despite your professional qualifications, you can still end up in trouble with the law. Wired reports that penetration testers sometimes end up in being arrested and kept in jail for days before the truth of their identities are ascertained, which really is the last place anyone wants to end up after a long day at work.

Rock climbing has become a mainstream activity in the 21st century, but imagine that it wasn't only your job, but that you also do it on one of the world's most iconic rock faces: Mount Rushmore.

According to Mitchell Republic, every year the Keystone sculpture requires a "concrete facelift," to preserve the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln and repair any weather damage they may have suffered over the past 12 months. Abseiling down the presidents' foreheads, noses, and chins, a team of ten Mount Rushmore staff are tasked with fixing cracks with Kevlar and silicone caulk, as well as assessing the condition of the rock face and testing for any structural issues the sculpture might face in the future.

More than two million people visit Mount Rushmore each year, according to the National Parks Service. But I don't think a single one of their photos will be able to beat a selfie taken by a Mount Rushmore repair technician hanging from Lincoln's nose.

There is an old rule among actors to "never work with children or animals," but when it comes to management, animals may in fact be the key to a joyful and wildly successful career. Sure, managing human talent might sound like nice work, but it also means that you encounter your fair share of prima donnas and egomaniacs. But the characteristics we rightly resent in humans we actively adore in the internet's favorite animals: cats.

Remember the iconic YouTube sensation Keyboard Cat? Well, that jumper-wearing music maestro did indeed have his own manager: Ben Lashes, an ex-professional musician himself and friend of Keyboard Cat's owner who realized that becoming a meme can generate a steady profit through licensing, as he explained in an interview with Kiro Radio. Lashes then went on to represent the interests of Nyan Cat and, the biggest internet cat sensation ever, Grumpy Cat.

"With Grumpy Cat alone, we've done the MTV Movie Awards, we've done two episodes of American Idol," Lashes said in 2015 (via the same source). "Grumpy Cat was the host of WWE Monday Night Raw. We were at the season finale of The Bachelorette with Grumpy Cat ... It's been one, big, crazy-long pinch-me moment."

If you have an eye for fashion, it's a cert that you love putting outfits together, not only for yourself but for other people. Now imagine you got paid for it. Oh yeah, and you don't actually have to pay for any of the clothes yourself. What more could you last for?

As reported by India Today, professional fashion stylists get to work with the biggest names in movies, TV, and music and be the brains behind those show-stopping outfits that grab headlines every awards season. However, as the celebrity stylist Ayesha Amin Nigam explains (via the same source), a stylist and designer are very different: "A designer is a person who conceptualizes the clothes, works on the line, and produces it. A fashion stylist is a person who styles the clothes produced by the designer. They put them together to create a full look, add the accessories, props, focus on hair and makeup, and give the creative direction to the concept which is created by the designer. It is like icing the cake."

Most stylists start out with an agency or as part of the editorial team of a magazine before finding their feet, after which they can become the permanent stylist of some of the world's biggest stars and create the latest looks everyone is talking about.

If you're a lover of marine life and of the sea in general, chances are you've given diving a try, or, at least, enjoy floating around the surface of the water with a snorkel on vacation, taking in the underwater scenery. Now imagine that hitting the underwater world day after day was your job. It would feel like you were on vacation every day, wouldn't it?

The life of a dive guide is certainly a charmed one. Lawrence Watkins, a dive guide in Florida, gave Scuba Diving a summary of his working day, which he describes as "5 to 5," in that he starts each day super early. But once the paperwork's done and the group is assembled, the hours are filled exploring the warm currents, pointing out flora and fauna of the reef.

And as Scuba Diver Life explains, the role of a dive guide isn't to keep an eye on individual divers, but to ensure that "the dive," i.e. the route and conditions, are safe for the group as a whole — far more relaxing than having the responsibility of teaching beginners the ropes.

It doesn't take much explaining why a job that involves getting paid to eat is fun; sure, eating is a basic human need, but it is also one of life's greatest pleasures, and it doesn't take a devoted hedonist to realize that receiving a paycheck for consuming food makes being a food critic one of the most desirable jobs out there.

The British food critic Jay Rayner reviews everything from top-notch Michelin starred restaurants to street food stands, and is aware of his privileged position thanks in part to the great deal of correspondence he receives from fans asking how to become a food critic just like him, according to Business Insider. Rayner receives so many of these contacts that he eventually decided to write a cookie-cutter response, explaining that to become a food critic one has to spend years as a journalist first; that the success of a food critic relies on the quality of their writing. "The editor offered me the restaurant column not because he thought I knew a lot about the subject but because he thought I would write entertainingly," Rayner explains.

But whether we care about the quality of writing or not, the multitude of amateur reviews out there on both review platforms and private blogs attests to the fact that sharing our opinions about the food we eat is just as fun as eating it, whether we're paid for it or not.

Look, this last one is a little fancy, but it's on the list for a reason. The fact is, there are a great number of things of which it would be brilliant to be an expert taster. Ice cream expert? What a life. Professional chocolate taster? Heaven. But really, is there anything really approaching wine — the master sommelier's stock-in-trade — for range of flavor, history, and cultural cachet?

It's a classy and desirable role, but getting up to the level of knowledge required is a daunting challenge, with the title protected by the Court of Master Sommeliers, whose four levels of grueling tests gained wider exposure following the release of the documentary "Somm: Into The Bottle," which charts the efforts of four wine lovers on their separate paths towards viticultural greatness.

Jack Mason was just 27 when he became a Master Sommelier, a journey which took him six years, according to Business Insider. "After working for so many years to achieve the shiny gold pin I still don't quite believe that I can now call myself a Master Sommelier," he said; at the time of writing, just 269 people in the whole world hold the coveted title (via Binwise).