Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth. Or at least they think they do. Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness — and lowest levels of self-reported stress — of any major industry category, according to our analysis of thousands of time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. (Additional reporting sharpened our focus on lumberjacks and foresters, but almost everyone who works on farms or in forests stands out.) The time-use survey typically asks people to record what they were doing at any given time during the day. But in four recent surveys, between 2010 and 2021, they also asked a subset of those people how meaningful those activities were, or how happy, sad, stressed, pained and tired they felt on a six-point scale. …While our friends the lumberjacks and farmers do the least-stressful work, their jobs are well-known to be particularly perilous, and they report the highest levels of pain on the job. To puzzle out why, we zoomed out to look at activity categories beyond work.