Whether you are locked into the career of your choice, always in search of a new job or you are unemployed full-time, there are lots of reasons to envy someone else’s profession and even more reasons to be thankful you don’t do what they do. Let’s take a look at the Top 10 Scariest Jobs to have after one more paragraph to help up the word count.

Ignoring the obvious like worrying about your boss realizing she doesn’t pay you to do anything or thinking you might be fired at any given moment because you are writing posts while in the office instead of working or even that you might be told you are being shipped out to a foreign country because of business reasons, there are lots of scary jobs out there. Which is great for when you’re completing a Top 10 Scariest Jobs list!

10. Arborist – Your job is to climb the highest trees someone from ground-level can spot and either make them pretty, chop them down or analyze what makes them trees. Pretty much a death sentence for anyone with a Fear of Heights, arborists are usually thrill-seekers with heavy premiums on their life insurance. After graduating from tree college, arborists spend their days literally looking down at the world. 

9. YouTube Star – Is there a more volatile career move than the life of a blogger? Yes, being a YouTube Star. Your career started one of two ways: a video that somehow went viral and you earned money from advertisements but you could never follow-up the success of or you spent years slowly building a following and now it’s resulted in posting new content everyday in order to stay relevant. You are competing in the ’15 Minutes of Fame’ industry which doesn’t exactly look strong on a resume. 

8. Drug Dealer – Sort of the forgotten profession in modern society, Drug Dealers must build up their reputation and network across all types of people including the ones you walk to the other side of the street to avoid, college dropouts, college superstars, powerful business moguls and the criminally insane. You have to be a pretty good salesperson to not only sell someone illegal substances but also not get stabbed in the process. It’s like being a door-to-door vacuum salesman but replace vacuums with drugs and doors with Russian roulette. 

7. Electrician – You can’t spell electrician without electrocution! The primary job function of an electrician is to fix the mistakes of other people who didn’t do a good job at managing a source of power capable of killing you or illuminating a dentist office. When they aren’t re-wiring houses or buildings, they are wiring airplanes, suspended from electrical wires which power entire cities or at the store purchasing rubber clothing to avoid things like death. 

6. Mortician – It’s a sad time when someone dies but it’s also the time when a mortician’s job really comes to life! Responsible for things like putting make-up on corpses, replacing corpse blood with embalming fluid (is that how that works?) to keep them looking less dead and otherwise being surrounded by people who could become zombies at any given moment is a typical day in the life. 

5. Zoo Keeper – You know when you go to a zoo or spot an animal in the wild and think to yourself ‘well it’s a good thing I don’t have to make a career trying not to get eaten by that thing’? Being a Zoo Keeper means that part of your brain is broken. Your job is to ensure the lives of people who visit the zoo are safe by standing in the cage and acting as a distraction for man-eating creatures. It’s sort of like being an exterminator but instead of going to schools and removing rabid coyotes from roaming the halls, you instead might go to schools and teach children why coyotes can claw someone’s eyes out with their teeth. 

4. Airplane Pilot – If you think your commute into work each morning is tough, imagine operating a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds in the sky moving at speeds that no vehicle in the sky should move at. To make matters worse, you have to navigate the skies with hundreds of passengers on board including screaming babies and people who don’t understand personal space. I was initially going to make this one about ‘air traffic control’ people but I got them confused with the people who just stand on the tarmac and wave those orange pylons around and now it’s too late to undo. 

3. Doctor – The way you make money is by not killing people who only see you when they are at risk of dying. Your responsibilities include: cutting people open and assessing why their internal organs aren’t doing well, prescribing life-saving medication to someone by writing down the dosage with illegible font while working 24-hour shifts with the expectation you are always performing with razor-sharp precision and attention to detail. You also get paid an uncomfortable amount of money and therefore have more taxes to pay. Managing finances can be scary.

2. Fire Fighter – What’s scarier than fire which is capable of searing your flesh within seconds of contact? Being the one responsible for putting it out. The job of a Fire Fighter is a thankless one where they are often responsible for going to buildings and issuing small fines because someone didn’t know you can’t leave something in a toaster for 45 minutes. However, it’s also a heroic one where their primary job function is to stand inside a blazing inferno with a hose and try to prevent scorching flames from engulfing an entire house which could collapse at any moment. They also save cats from trees in popular folklore. 

1. Bomb Squad – Your job, by definition, is to approach live explosives and see if you can not have them complete their primary function which is to detonate before they do detonate. You can’t really say whether or not a member of a Bomb Squad is ‘good’ at their job because not being good basically means they’ve exploded. It’s one of those jobs where you basically hope your boss never actually calls you into work so you can instead do things that aren’t bomb-related. 

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