Anti Gravity: Take This Job and Do It; June 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Steve Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

People often underestimate (or misunderestimate in special, high-level circumstances) the difficulties inherent in other people's jobs. Wake Forest University football coach Chuck Mills once summed up the phenomenon with this description of the average college football fan: "He's the person who sits 40 rows up in the stands and wonders why a 17-year-old kid can't hit another 17-year-old kid with a ball from 40 yards away. Then he goes out to the parking lot and can't find his car."

A new study, however, notes that there may be an actual neurological basis for our assumptions that other people have easier jobs than our own, or what I have found myself thinking of as "presumptive piker syndrome."