The World's Most Overrated Professions - Part I

Over the years I've noticed that one thing seems to hold true of almost every profession, with very few exceptions.  In almost every field, the practitioners have an inflated sense of just how important their job is.  I attribute this largely to humanity's general tendency toward self-importance.  This is compounded by the fact that people often spend the majority of their waking hours with colleagues from their own field and the in-group dynamic fosters a sense that the world begins and ends with their particular line of work.  As it turns out, some professions warrant this type of collective narcissism.  (I won't mention what they are for fear of exacerbating their already inflated egos.)  But there are other professions for whom this self-importance is grossly undeserved.  Additionally, there are those professions that the general public mistakenly believes require an inordinate amount of skill or talent.  The following is a list of professions whose prestige and perceived importance are the least commensurate with the actual benefit they confer upon society.  Additional points are allotted for professions whose reputation is unwarranted given the mediocre level of skill or intelligence required to perform the job.  So in no particular order, here are the world’s most overrated professions.

1)      Dentist

I’d love for someone to do a scientific study to determine if people who regularly visit the dentist actually have a higher quality of life or a longer life expectancy.  My guess is ‘negative’ on both counts.  In my experience, every time I’ve gone to the dentist, I showed up with my mouth feeling fine, and I left with my mouth in considerable discomfort.  Whenever I’ve complained about my gums being red and inflamed, they’d blame me for not flossing enough, rather than pointing to the obvious culprit (i.e. the fact that they’d been jabbing and scraping at my soft tissues with sharp metal objects for the better part of an hour.)

I don’t doubt that dentist are smart people.  Dentistry is probably one of the most difficult programs to get into out of undergrad.  But I’m sceptical that those smarts every really get put to use, since 90% of what they do seems to be pretty banal.  A lot of the prestige of being a dentist comes from the fact that they earn so much money, and rightly so.  I’d need at least 150k/year to withstand the monotony of spending 30 to 40 hours a week peering into the pie-holes of strangers, many of whom have substandard oral hygiene. Still, just because the cash is hard-earned, the social caché is most certainly not.

2)      Political Pundit

I’ve written at length about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of most journalists.  In fact, I could probably populate this entire list using only journalism-related professions.  But for now I’ll just deal with political pundits.  Political pundits don’t share the intellectual insipidness that is endemic within the journalism community.  Nor are they guilty of the unethical tactics used by many tabloid journalists.  But political pundits exemplify the hubris that runs rampant in journalistic circles.  The political pundit is the embodiment that journalistic mantra that says, by virtue of having gone to journalism school, they are all self-appointed experts in any field that may happen to require punditry or pontification at any given moment.

The job of the average political pundit is bizarre to say the least.  For the most part, they’re hired by news outlets to inform the public about how the public is likely to interpret the latest manoeuvrings of top politicians.  This begs several questions.  Most notably, ‘how do they know?’ And even more importantly, ‘who cares?’ This job makes the list based on its unconscionable uselessness.  I don’t need a pundit to tell me how I should feel about my elected officials.  And if I want to get a sense for how the elderly demographic in Alberta is reacting, I’d much rather access that information in the form of an interview with an elderly Albertan than to rely on speculation from some 27-year-old pundit in Ottawa.  What’s worse is that networks like CNN that devote massive chunks of their programming to punditry can actually have a subversive effect on a democracy by overly sensationalizing even the smallest perceived misstep in order to create a buzz and attract viewers.  It’s kind of like a journalistic Heisenberg principle, where the observer inevitably has an impact on the event she or he is supposed to be observing.