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gwern comments on (Virtual) Employment Open Thread - Less Wrong
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A good job for mindless physical activity: cart-pusher at Walmart. I did this in high school, and it is still easily the best job I've ever had. You work at your own pace, you're outdoors, the managers usually ignore you (so you don't even have to obey dress code). Mostly I just screwed around with my coworkers.
Basically you just spend all day walking (with occasional bursts of hard physical exercise). I lost 40 pounds in the first 6 months and got into the best shape I have ever been in. There's also a kind of pleasant exhaustion after putting in 8.5 hours.
ETA: These jobs are extremely easy to get: even though I lived in an economically depressed area, I was hired without even an interview. A woman from HR called 90 minutes after I submitted my application.
A good job for not even that: in high school I worked summers as night-watch at a local suburban pool. 40 hours a week, $9.20/hr, or ~$4000 a summer. There was zero demand on my time during it since I worked overnight. I got a lot of reading done.
The only downside was that it was seasonal (so you couldn't just do that job), and you could be profoundly mentally screwed by the sleep schedule.
I think I could do better now than I did before with melatonin, modafinil, blackout curtains, etc.
It doesn't seem like the seasonal basis of the job is inherant in night-watchmen idea - there must be lots of warehouses, etc., that need nightwatchmen. I can imagine worse things than being paid to read.
Right. In my case, the seasonality came from it being a pool - it was only worthwhile to pay nightwatchmen when it was actually filled and multi-million dollar liability existed for accidental drowning (read: middle-class teens holding drugged parties).
In a more 'real' nightwatch job, seasonality might not be a problem. On the other hand, you might have more supervision than I did. (Which was none. I saw my nominal boss once at the beginning.)
In any event, the free time was what you made of it. Akrasia was a major issue.
A job in a similar vein which I know of but haven't personally held: Night shift at a funeral home. Someone needs to do embalming prep for bodies that show up at 2:37 AM, and they'll generally pay well for you being on-site and on-call.