Lawyers‘œI decided law was the exact opposite of sex; even when it was good, it was lousy.’ ‘“ Mortimer Zuckerman

On Sunday, The New York Times included an article called The Falling-Down Professions where Alex Williams describes how the most elite of the traditional professions (law and medicine) have lost some of their prestige. When Jossip mentioned it today, a picture of Neil Patrick Harris as Doogie Howser circa 1989 accompanied the blurb. David Hauslaib continues to humor me.

Williams argues that the chosen professions of doctors and lawyers were at one time unquestionably prestigious:

Sure, bankers made big money and professors held impressive degrees. But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars ‘” outsize pay, long-term security, impressive schooling and authority over grave matters ‘” doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all.

Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

Wobble indeed. How many doctors and lawyers do you know that are happy? On Friday, I interviewed Michael Melcher, the author of The Creative Lawyer and he had some interesting things to say about the profession:

I think that most people choose to go to law school because it offers them a general sense of security, of which income potential is one kind. Becoming a lawyer offers the possibility of money, status, a clear identity, the opportunity to help others, connection to public policy, credibility in the business world, as well as the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing lure of keeping your options open. The problem is that most would-be lawyers do not examine specifically what they want and how achievable those goals might be before they make the decision to go to law school. So many go into the profession with the vague, unexamined idea that they will have a career that will allow them to help people AND make a lot of money AND be intellectually stimulated AND be relevant to the marketplace. People might manage to put all these factors together with effort, but rarely will it just happen. So typically reality is different from what people expect, in part because their expectations are, to use a fun legal word, inchoate.

Lawyers are the profession with the lowest job satisfaction. (Doctors are second.) Oddly, lawyers are also, on average, the highest paid profession. Wealthy lawyers who are unhappy are unhappy because there are other things they want out of life that they are not getting. Money might be important, but it’s not the only important thing. Since most lawyers enter the field at a very young age, they typically don’t have much experience in other sectors, and therefore have little idea how to adapt themselves to other kinds of jobs. So their unhappiness is increased by a sense of being trapped, which is not really true. Unhappy lawyers are the keepers of their own cells. (That’s why they need to get my book!)

Hmm, the keepers of their own cells? Yeah, really’¦ nobody forced the handcuffs and led them to prison. Williams continues on in the Times:

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward ‘” where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites ‘” some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline’¦ is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

But Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions doesn’t quite concur. He warns that the grass isn’t always greener:

Perhaps a brief swim in the TechCrunch DeadPool could bring these folks out of their quarterlife-style quagmire. For every glittering Mt. Zuckerberg, there’s an iceberg of ‘œwanna-be-preneurs’ with little more than a business plan and a prayer. Seriously, there are reasons for doctors and lawyers to be glum, but I think they have little to do with the fantasies of early retirement or nonstop creativity the article adumbrates.

Maybe so. And he continues on stating that the better question is how these professions will respond to the ‘œwave of inequality’ that has made many of them miserable in the first place.

Finally, in closing and just for fun, Meghan Daum, my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times, suggested in the wake of the writer’s strike, that last week:

Leno reminded us that writers are as important as ER doctors. After all, being on stage with nothing to say qualifies as an emergency.

So what do you think? Is professional status now linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity instead of the traditional pillars that once made the pursuit of law and medicine so attractive?