My good friend and highly valued colleague Pat Springer posted something on Facebook that’s calculated to make people like me do a header off a building.

It’s the tail end of CareerCast.com’s 2012 list of best and worst jobs. Newspaper reporter came in at 196, followed by oil rig worker (197), enlisted military soldier (198), dairy farmer (199) and lumberjack (200).

What interested me is that the job I spent more than half my life doing is listed above three that are pretty dangerous (and I suppose a pissed-off dairy cow isn’t much fun to deal with either).

I happen to know a tiny bit about oil rig workers, since that is what all three of my girlfriend’s sons do. It’s sort of a classic good news-bad news job. It’s physically quite brutal, occasionally dangerous and the hours are tough; they work 10 days on and 10 days off. Her two older sons have kids and if there are any family commitments, you don’t get extra time off. Those guys earn every nickel they make.

The good news is that it’s a lot of nickels. All three of her boys make six-figure incomes.

Little as I’d like to do their jobs, though, I’d much rather be an oil rig worker than a soldier, whose whole job is to get shot at, or a lumberjack, who risks being crushed by a tree every shift. At least as a reporter, I was reasonably sure of going home at night.

I’m sure it got the low ranking because of the rotten pay, crappy hours and nearly total lack of job security. I’m also sure that when people outside the business hear about the down side of the work, they wonder why anybody goes into it.

I often jokingly – half-jokingly, anyway – tell people I went into it because I had only one marketable skill, writing, and there was no heavy lifting. If I could do math, I’ve often said, I’d have a real job.

Many a truth is indeed said in jest, but there are reasons why, despite the low pay, crappy hours and jerks I often worked for, I’ve never regretted my career choice. In fact, during my once-a-semester “come to Jesus” talk with my writing students, where I tell them about the real world, I start out talking about those down sides, but I end up telling them about why it’s still not a bad career choice.

It all depends on what one considers important about one’s daily work. There are people who are motivated entirely, or mostly, by the money they make. That’s not a judgment, by the way; whatever reasons one has for working is sufficient. There are others who are motivated by a job that enables them to deal in cold, hard numbers. They like the unquestioning precision of the mathematical world, the sense that what appears to be actually is. They don’t want to bother much with ambiguity.

I am not either of those types. I’m not any better or worse than them, I’m simply different. The things that fascinate me, like the vagaries and illogic of the human animal, would bore them or drive them to distraction. Different strokes, as they say.

So what makes a person take a job with lousy pay and lousy hours? Different things.

For some of us, and I’m in this camp, it’s the chance to make a living with words. Words are my peculiar gift and I’ve always loved them. I wanted to be a writer from an early age. I suspect that when I put together a really cool string of them, that says exactly what I want to say and says it well, it’s probably the same feeling an accountant gets when everything balances perfectly to the penny. When it’s going well, writing can be an amazing experience. It scares the hell out of most people because it doesn’t often go that well, but everybody’s who’s ever done it willingly will tell you that there are moments when you touch outside of every-day experience.

Other reporters are motivated to tell the big truth. What you find out, after a few years, is that you can’t do that; it’s simply not possible. But in every story, you can tell a truth. And that is still a fine thing.

Some – most of us – want to fight for truth, justice and the American way, at least sometimes. Probably 95 percent of the stories a reporter does don’t really do that, but every once in a while you get to provide someone with a measure of rough justice just by doing your job. I’ve never been a hero, but I’ve helped heroes get recognized. I’ll settle for that any day of the week.

Even though this column is the closest thing to reporting I do now, I think of these things often. If my plans work out, I’ll be training people to become reporters. I’m at the age where the best thing I can do is prepare the next generation. And here’s the thing: I’ll talk to these young kids, these student reporters, and I will hear in their voices the nascent lilt of the search for a truth. I will hear that there is something outside of themselves that matters to them. I will hear hope, however quixotic, that they will somehow tell a story that changes the world; more optimistically, I often hear the hope that they will tell a story that touches someone.

And that, despite the pay and the hours and the lack of understanding, is why we do what we do. It gives us a chance to be part of something much bigger than ourselves and, in the process, maybe play a small role in what that big thing becomes.

And besides, it beats heavy lifting.