Where can I find a cushy desk job with a psychology degree?

Well, earning the psychology degree in the first place is neither slow-paced nor low stress. In fact, it’s a ton of work and takes many years. So that may detail your plan from the get go.

@cookieman Then the question is how to get a cushy job with a high school diploma?

Define “cushy.” I have a psychology degree, I have a “desk job” at a law firm, and I don’t deal with customers (bonus). The pay is good, the hours are good, and I have my own office with a door I can shut if I don’t want to be bothered. However, it’s not as low stress as you might think. And it took more than a psychology degree to get this job.

The idea that you picked psychology because you thought it would be an easy degree to attain is sort of insulting.

@talljasperman: Here’s the long and the short of it;

• With HS diploma, “cushy job” = low pay. For example, clerk at a Hallmark store in a suburban area.

• With college degree, “cushy job” could be many things, but we’ll say director at a college making decent cabbage (which is what I am currently). It’s pretty “cushy”. I come and go as I please, I love what I do, I love my students, my teachers are great, I have nice quiet office with muppets in it and I play jazz all day. I’m not breaking rocks.

But that’s after 20+ years of busting my ass at a variety of really difficult jobs working for many horrible people. And sixteen of those years I worked two jobs averaging sixty hours a week.

So “cushy” doesn’t just fall out of the sky one day and bite you on the ass.

And, for what it’s worth, I love Hallmark stores.

@livelaughlove21 Sorry I am half way through a psychology degree. I mistook the difficulty because of the low admission average to get in from university to university… Honestly I thought I could find a way to raise my intelligence from doing research in psychology and then going back and passing high school physics and write novels about time travel applied applications of.

@cookieman I would love to work for a book store like Indigo, Coles, or Chapters.

@talljasperman: Good friend of mine (nice older gal, 60s) works a local, mom & pop, used book store. She loves it. Very low stress. She gets to read much of the day. The work consists of helping customers, dusting, reshelving books.

@cookieman Then that’s it ... I should buy a shaver, brush my teeth, comb my hair, and re-apply for a bookstore customer services rep.

with the government.

@talljasperman Nearly every job involves stress and hard work, except for positions of very low responsibility (the bookstore clerk or hallmark cashier in answers above.)

Or, like @rojo says, you can work for the government. I know a handful of people whose jobs are pretty much literally pushing paper. The actual work involves working with a team to create giant documents, with recommendations for different government agencies on how to streamline their operations. Each document takes several months or more for the team to write. (Yeahhh, doesn’t anyone see the irony in that?) Does anyone ever read these things? Who knows.

This is actually consulting work for government contractors, but it’s big business here. The people I know who do it have a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, which means they can afford the housing market here, they have new cars, and they go out to bars and restaurants fairly often. I’m sure there are areas of government consulting that are more exciting and meaningful, but this is what the work looks like for a lot of 20 and 30 somethings I know, who work in this field.

If you find work you actually care about, that can mitigate the stress. If you take pride in the work and find it meaningful, then working hard can actually be… fun.

You didn’t ask, but I’m going to butt in with my own personal opinion here. Looking for a “cushy” job seems to say, “how can I find a job where I don’t have to do that much, but they pay me a lot?” And that kind of misses the point of having a job. If you see work as merely putting in time in order to get paid, you’re going to be miserable for your whole career, constantly watching the clock tick by until it’s time to leave.

There are so many people in the workforce like that. Young people complain that they can’t find jobs, but they also fire off generic resumés and cover letters to every employer out there. Employees who legitimately give a shit are really rare and it’s a quality you can’t teach someone,and those are the people who are still finding the good jobs. Why do you like psychology? What is meaningful about it, to you? If you follow those answers, you will find the right job.