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These 6 professions are known for having the 'coolest, most honest, most together' people

Park rangers, for one.

Photos by Eddson Lens (left) and Big Bag Films (right)

Librarians and bass guitar players were both mentioned as "good people" professions.

Have you ever noticed that the majority of people in certain jobs seem to be a bit nicer that most other people? More solid? More honest? A little more high-level humans overall?

While there's a wide range of personal diversity in every profession, there are some careers that seem to either attract or produce exceptional people. Exceptions to the exceptional exist, of course, but there are some jobs that people are calling out—with many people in agreement—as having the "coolest, most honest, most together people."

Park Rangers

People who care about nature, protect our public lands and help educate the public about good stewardship? Not surprising that Reddit users would call those folks solid human beings.

"Park rangers are some of the coolest, most genuine people you'll meet. They care deeply about nature, are always willing to help visitors, and have fascinating stories about the wildlife and landscapes they protect." – Sexy-Ass18

"Seconded. First thing I ever wanted to be was a park ranger, because the ones I knew were just the coolest." – belligerentoptimist

"Can confirm all of this. One of my best friends from high school is a LEO ranger and actually now in a fairly major role at Yellowstone. She is seriously the coolest individual, absolutely one of the best humans ever. She went to school for wildlife education or something like that, but has gone to FLETC training and basically ran the internal prison at Yellowstone for a while. She is one of the most badass people I know. She told me once that they have millions of visitors per year. All of those visitors bring all of their problems (domestic abuse, drugs, alcoholism, theft, etc) to the parks with them, so.... the park had a prison for holding people until they could be turned over to other law enforcement. They also had particular people who would deal with visitors who died in the park, including liaising with families, helping arrange to get remains returned home, etc. And that happened regularly. Apparently national parks are a major suicide destination, which is incredibly hard on the rangers who have to deal with it. She told me stories about deaths at the Grand Canyon when she was there.... It was exactly as bad as you imagine it would be to deal with suicides at the Grand Canyon. They do not leave them there, so.... Yeah. And people have to clean it up. It's absolutely insane all that goes on in the major parks that nobody thinks about." – SpectrumDiva

"One of my college friends is a park ranger. He's just the coolest guy. Always feel lucky when we get to hang out, get our kids all mixed up.

That being said, he's raising fearless heathens. One picked up a snake and was like "it's ok, we have the antidote in the truck." while waving it at my poor, defenseless city kids. They just ran away haha. Park ranger friend made his kid put the snake back and gave him an earful about not harassing wildlife and city people." – ButtWhispererer

Librarians

Lots of love for librarians out there.

"Honestly, from my anecdotal experience...librarians. Smart, consistently know how to deal with the greater public, great resources of knowledge, and live for the truth." – SirVeritas79

"I have always loved the way they talk to me when I have a question. I never feel stupid or bad for asking. They really are a 'people person.'" – SillyGayBoy

"YES! Agree! My wife and I have a couple of friends who are librarians and they are probably some of the smartest, most patient and kind people we know. And none of them are 280 years old, which used to be the stereotype I had of librarians because that was all I ever saw growing up. One of those friends is married to a childhood buddy of mine - they are both in their late 40s - been together since their 20s. When they first met I was shocked that someone so young was a librarian lol but also thought it was awesome. I’ve told them both many times that they can’t ever get divorced because we are keeping both of them ha ha

"Seriously though librarians are community treasures and a way underrated profession. 💯" – Intrepid_Detective

"I worked at as a children's librarian assistant for 3 years. It was awesome. People there were so chill, easy to get along with. Best office environment ever. Good stable government job, no need to constantly apply for grants or hustle. And knowledge all around." – kathmhughes

"As a librarian, I've often remarked that the best part of the profession is other librarians." – thatbob

Bass Players

"Bass players in a jazz band...best job in the world I might add." – myobservationonly

"Bass players in general honestly. Which is a tough thing to admit as a guitarist." – tintedwithrose

"As a pianist who usually plays right next to them...agreed. Bassists are my homies." – Casul_Tryhard

"As a drummer I totally agree. My bass player is probably the most talented member of our band, but he'd rather put everyone else in the spotlight. Also, even though he's super frugal he will gladly pay for dinner and drinks and buy us tickets to shows. He's a great guy and I'm really proud to say he's my friend." – Childish_Calrissian

"Most of the bassists I've met are kind, selfless people. I think there's something about the role of the instrument itself that attracts the kind of people who enjoy holding it all together without needing the attention and adulation that comes with it.

Of course, being a bassist myself, this could be complete bias lol." – the_alt_fright

"Singer here. It’s true. Every bass player I’ve played with is an exceptional human. My wife is one and she’s my rock. The bassist I played with on Saturday has his own non-profit for homeless outreach. My main bass player makes incredible falafel wraps when we carpool, with sourdough pita from scratch." – cha-do


Toll Booth Operators (but only in certain places, apparently)

Oddly enough, some toll booth operators in certain countries and specific places in the U.S. got a shout-out for being utterly delightful.

"In Japan, for some inexplicable reason, tollbooth operators. Everytime I take the freeway, those people are the friendliest, cheeriest, just overall nice people I meet in a month. Zero clue why." – festoon_the_dragoon

"It's actually the same here in Ireland. Always wondered why but they are super friendly every time you go through." – 5Ben5

"The toll booth operators on the Mackinaw Bridge are all super nice." – HalfaYooper

"I’ve actually had pretty positive experiences for the most part while using tolls in the northeast US! Pretty shockingly friendly people. To the point where my partner and I were like, 'how do you think they stay so cheery while literally sitting in the middle of a highway for hours on end?'" – Outandabout2023

"A few weeks ago I was driving to Topeka, KS and the toll booth operator was so friendly and asked me if I was doing anything fun in Topeka while I was there. I told her I was just picking up a movie from Vintage Stock but she was so friendly and the best part of my mini road trip from KC. I’ve actually never had an unfriendly Kansas toll booth experience." – i_n_c_r_y_p_t_o

Geologists

"Every geologist I ever met has been a pretty interesting, humble and enjoyable person to be around. Somebody who works in the field will probably reply back and disagree, lol." – LittleKitty235

"My father was a geologist, in the 70s he quit working for (major US oilco) because they wanted him to falsify data. So, yeah, they're honest. My dad told me once that it was one of the most romantic of the sciences...it wasn't the study of rocks but of how planets are formed, and therefore life. I so miss him." – WorldBiker

"Came here to say Geologist and surprised to see it near the top. We are awesome haha!" – Latchkey_Wizzard

These responses also prompted a flood of geologist puns, which pretty much rocked:

"They probably had a good foundation growing up."

"Agreed. Very down to earth and grounded in reality."

"I think they just don't try to find faults in people."

"They're good at digging beneath the crust of a person and seeing what's on the inside.'

"Generally speaking, rock solid people."

"They focus on having good mantle health."

"At their core, they accept the fluid nature of existence."

"They’re really gneiss, and don’t take friendship for granite."

"They’re truly sedimental people."

"There has to be one or two who are full of schist though, right?"

"I bet they dig these comments!"

Local Beat Newspaper Reporters

"Print reporters who’ve covered the same community their whole lives are pretty amazing people. People like to glom together all media, but reporters with a civic drive are some of the most curious and honest people I’ve ever spent time around. If you want people who really want to get to the bottom of a story and operate from facts/evidence, these are people to pay attention to. We owe a lot of what we actually know for sure in society to the labor local reporters." – SenorSplashdamage

"Very true, but they're all nearing extinction. The ones I know are just struggling to make it to retirement.

I've been a media guy for nearly four decades. Print reporters are good people." – Lincoln_Park_Pirate

"My uncle was a reporter in the Twin Cities his entire career. He wrote for the paper and local magazine. Extremely interesting guy who has a story about everything and seems to know the history of every patch of land and building in the area." – evilhomer3k

"I live in a small-ish town (about 15,000 residents). For years, we had a local paper, but it eventually went under as it was not profitable as the world moved more toward internet news. So, for a few years, we had nothing. Then, a guy who didn't even live in the town (but it was where he grew up) started an "online newspaper" and covered everything that went on (good and bad) pretty much as a labor of love and in addition to his job as a reporter at one of the much larger local papers. He makes a little bit of money from banner ads and sponsored ads, but that pretty much only covers his costs. However, he spends his time covering things in town, interviewing people, going to meetings, writing obituaries, etc. Plus, of late, he has taken some high school and college students under his wing and sent them out to report on some things in town. He is not obligated to do ANY of it - he's not profiting from it in any way, it is of no advantage to him, but he does it anyway... That speaks volumes about his character to me." – Madeline73

The human family is full of all kinds of people with a virtually endless array of personalities, characteristics, qualities and interests. But some simply stand out for their awesomeness and congregate in certain jobs, so here's to the park rangers, librarians, bass players and others who have earned a reputation for being solid human beings we can all appreciate.

good people
Popular

A woman threw out a $1 million lottery ticket. These honest store owners returned it to her.

CBS News/YouTube

When the owners of the Lucky Stop convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts discovered a $1 million winning lottery ticket in a stack of discarded tickets, they could have kept it for themselves or given it to a friend or family member. Instead, they returned it to the woman who had bought it and accidentally tossed it aside—an act of integrity and honesty that both heartwarming and inspiring.

Lea Fiega bought a $30 Diamond Millions scratch-off ticket at the end of March, but she didn't scratch the ticket fully. If she had, she would have noticed two matching numbers that indicated she had won $1 million.

"I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn't look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away," she told the Associated Press according to WACH News.

The ticket sat in a wastebasket of discarded tickets for 10 days, until the store owners looked through them before permanently throwing them away.

"One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn't scratch the number," Abhi Shah, the son of the store owners told WWLP-TV. "I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket."

"I was a millionaire for a night," Shah told CBS News. He began thinking of all the things he could do with the money.

But the family consulted together the next morning, even calling Shah's grandparents in India for their input. Fiega was a regular customer at the store, and the Shahs knew that the ticket had belonged to her. They also knew that she obviously hadn't meant to throw away a million dollars.

Shah told CBS News that his grandmother said, 'Let's not keep the ticket. It's not right. Just give it back to them. If it's in your luck, you will get it anyhow.'"

So that's what they did. And boy was Fiega surprised when Abhi Shah showed up at her workplace.

"He came to my office and said 'my mom and dad would like to see you,'" Fiega told WACH News. "I said 'I'm working,' and he said 'no you have to come over.' So I went over there and that's when they told me. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them."

Million-dollar lottery ticket returned to winner who mistakenly discarded itwww.youtube.com

Fiega had already felt incredibly lucky after she nearly died earlier this year after contracting COVID-19. Getting the news from her local convenience store that she had accidentally thrown away a million dollars and that the owners were returning it to her was nearly unbelievable.

"I mean, who does that? They're great people. I am beyond blessed," she said.

Fiega told WACH that she gave the family part of her winnings and that she's saving the rest for retirement. The store owners also receive $10,000 from the state lottery commission for selling the winning ticket.

Other regular customers told CBS News that they were not surprised by the Shahs' kindness and selflessness in returning the winning ticket.

"They're just purely good people," one customer said. "You can tell just by talking to them."

Thank you, Shah family, for serving as an example of doing the right thing even when you don't have to, and for giving us all a boost of faith in humanity.

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Wellness

After 16 years sober, Dax Shepard bravely announced a reset of his sobriety clock

Dax Shepard/Instagram

With 16 years of sobriety under his belt, Dax Shepard has served as a beacon of hope for people in recovery. With a reset of his sobriety clock last week after confessing to a slip with prescription painkillers, he still is.

The actor has been open about his addiction to alcohol and cocaine, and that transparency and honesty has undoubtedly helped many people through their own recovery journeys. But recovery from addiction is not always a one-way, detour-free road. Even people who have been sober for years must be diligent and self-aware or risk relapsing in ways that are easy to justify.

That's the scenario Shepard described in his recent podcast, in which he announced that he's now seven days sober. For people who struggle with addiction, it's a cautionary tale. He didn't take a drink, and he didn't touch cocaine. His slide into addiction relapse happened with prescription painkillers—Vicodin and Percocet. He started taking prescription pain pills after a motorcycle accident in 2012, moved to taking pills with his dad who was dying of cancer, and then came a gradual spiral of justifications, lying, gas lighting, and other addictive behaviors that enabled him to abuse those pills without acknowledging he was doing so.

Shepard laid it all out to his podcast partner, Monica Padman, last week. The way he was careful at first to only take the pills his wife, Kristen Bell, administered. Then how he'd save his two nighttime pills, because they made it hard to sleep, only to take them the next day with his morning pills to get the high he wanted. How he'd ask himself if this was a slip, start feeling like he was maybe in trouble, then convince himself he had it under control.


He talked about how easy it was to convince himself it wasn't really a problem because the pill use felt "manageable." He knew if he started drinking or doing cocaine, he'd be out of control—he understood those to be unmanageable addictions. But the pain pills didn't keep him from doing his work or his dad duties or his normal daily life, so it was easy to keep using them.

Then he explained how, after more injuries this year, his painkiller use got "shadier and shadier." He started buying pills instead of just using the ones he was prescribed. When he started lying to his loved ones and was high at his 16-year sobriety celebration earlier this month—which he called "the worst hour of my life"—he knew he was in trouble.

So in recent weeks, Shepard came clean to Bell and Padman privately and gave them all of his remaining pills. He spoke to a friend he looks up to, who frankly told him that his biggest character flaw was arrogance, that he basically thought he was smart enough to outsmart addiction. He realized the only antidote to that was extreme humility.

Shepard attended an AA meeting and shared the whole story with them as well. He said it was one of the most powerful experiences he's had ever had.

"So Tuesday really was day one. Yeah. And then, so I went to this meeting and I…man, I've known the men in this meeting for seventeen and a half years because I had many attempts before I got going. And I told my whole story and I told it honestly. And I went first and I was crying and it turned into the most incredible, like, 90 minutes I've ever experienced, where there was just so much love and there was so much understanding and kindness in unconditional love.

And it's the only—there's probably been many others—but it's the only experience I can remember having that was just grace, the definition of grace, and it was very emotional and it was a really, really surreal kind of experience.

And when it was over, I actually mentally, for the first time in a very long time, felt optimistic because for the last while, a long time, I've known intellectually that things are going to get worse, that each encounter with it has gotten more shady and more dangerous, and I recognize that the next go around would be, oh, I can't get pills, let's snort heroin. And, you know, and I've had a lot of friends that I've watched go through this whole cycle.

And I finally have the humility to say I will not be any different, I won't be special, I won't be smarter. I will be exactly like everyone else."

Then he decided to come clean publicly, despite a great deal of fear and embarrassment in doing so. He said he worried about how it affect opportunities for Kristen, how it might impact him financially due to companies that might not want to work with him now, how the bombardment of judgments about what he should have done or could have done might feel, how people who looked up to him for his sobriety might feel betrayed or misled.

He ultimately decided that total and complete honesty was the only way to go. And of course, that authenticity is what his fellow recovering addicts really need to see.


"So if you got more than seven days, you got more than me. So you're my elder and I look up to you," said Shepard. "And, you know, onward and upward for all the people who have been along on this whole journey for the last few years. I feel—and this is not to sound cheesy, but I feel the same responsibility to the people who love the show and are with us, because I think it's such an emotional connection we all have."

Congratulations on your sobriety and thank you for your honesty, Dax. Onward and upward.

You can listen to Shepard's Armchair Expert "Day 7" podcast episode here.

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Dropping 17,000 ‘lost’ wallets across the globe taught researchers a big lesson about honesty.

Photo by Adam Gessaman / Flickr

The gold standard test for determining someone's honesty is seeing what that they do with a lost wallet. Do they keep it? Attempt to return it to the person who lost it? Or do they pocket the money and then dump it in a mailbox?

A researcher in Finland wanted to find out just how honest his countrymen were by posing as a tourist and dropping off a supposedly "lost" wallet with an employee at a local business and asking them to take care of it.

After the initial findings, the researchers hypothesized that if he added a larger sum of money in the billfold, fewer people would return the wallet. A poll of 279 top-performing academic economists agreed. But this time, the researchers decided to conduct the study on a larger scale.

Over two years, they staged over 17,000 wallet drops in 335 cities in 40 countries across the world and discovered that people are probably more honest than you think. The wallets were all about the same. They held a few business cards, a key, a grocery list. Some contained about $13 while others had no cash.

They discovered that in 38 of the 40 countries, people were much more likely to return wallets that had money, and in those that were less likely, the difference wasn't statistically significant.

Across 40 countries, 46% of wallets with no money were returned, compared with 61% with cash.

The researchers then conducted a "big money" study in the U.S., the U.K., and Poland by adding around $100 to the billfold and found that these wallets were returned 72% of the time.

"People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money," the study's lead author Alain Cohn said, according to NPR. "At first we almost couldn't believe it and told him to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding."

While the return rate in wallets with money versus no money was about the same across countries, there was a vast discrepancy in overall return rates. The more affluent countries returned the wallets far more often.

Switzerland, Norway, Netherlands,Denmark, and Sweden returned the highest percentage of wallets. China, Morocco, Peru, Kazakhstan, and Kenya returned the wallets at the lowest rate. The United States came out in the middle of the pack.

Although researchers aren't sure what specifically drives people to return lost wallets, basic human empathy is a huge reason. Another is that people don't want to think of themselves as thieves.

"[The study] shows in a very natural, experimental way our decisions about dishonesty are not about a rational cost-benefit analysis but about what we feel comfortable with from a social norm perspective and how much we can rationalize our decisions," Duke economist Dan Ariely told NPR.

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