On the other hand

With all these recent legal journal items about "work life balance" and lawyer mental health, maybe it'd be a good idea to take a look at the other side of this, if it is the other side.

That is, all of these article would lead a person to suggest that almost all lawyers must have the blues, big time, all the time.  Indeed, a friend of mine mentioned to me the other day, upon learning of a lawyers death, that lawyers "didn't seem happy".

But is that right?

I don't know, but I wonder.  What I wonder is if all these articles and the statistics in them are skewed. Clearly some people aren't happy in the profession, but then I suppose that's probably true of any profession.

In making a personal observation, I think I've only ever known one lawyer that seemed to me to be truly unhappy. But I also think that it was something with his character.  Maybe his profession was making him unhappy.  That seemed to be the case. But maybe that's because he was prone to that anyhow, and the choice of profession was a bad one. Indeed, that's been the point of my recent comments.  I don't think the view that the is driving everyone in it into despair is correct, so much as I think that it doesn't suit every personality.  If that's the case, the field should look at who is entering it and why, and people entering it should likewise try to see if they think the field matches their makeup. That's about the end of my point.

Having said that, in looking around at the hundreds of lawyers I've known, most don't seem to be unhappy.  Maybe the lawyers in Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah I run into are just exceptions, but I doubt it.  They mostly seem happy within their professions.

And there are reasons that the profession would suit people too, beyond the usual slop that people put out about "challenging" and all that rot.  It does entail, at least in the litigation end, an endless variety of interesting situations.  Most lawyers are polymaths really, and there are very few professions that truly offer an endless variety of interesting scenarios.  And there are lot of interesting people that lawyers get to work with as well.  It'd be hard to be bored, I think, being a lawyer, or at least being a litigator.

And for people who like to write, there's a lot of writing.  Not all of the writing is of the mystery thriller type, of course, but there are people who just like to write.  I do.  For those people, just getting to write is fun.  I love writing, which is probably obvious, and writing a brief for me is fun.  I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

All things being equal, therefore, I guess this takes me back to two points. I don't really trust statistics very much and what's important is that a person find out if a career is right for them.  There aren't any perfect ones, and they're all very individual.  A person who loves one thing might not another, and the concept that some careers are good ones because of what they pay is misguided, if it goes no further than that.