I used to think that the relation between unmotivated employees and their corporation was "parasitic" but I'm switching to an alternate framework, less influenced by corporate narrative. Maybe unmotivated employees are the antibodies of society, infiltrating companies no longer serving a useful purpose. The company will fight with its most powerful weapon: money. But money is to happiness what sugar to nutrition and eventually the humanity inside people wins. I hope it cheers you up next time you feel down at work: you are still human, a soldier in this fight.
What is the solution? Of course I have answers for this (too). Destroy/split the companies. They accumulate too much money and power and have no idea how to spend it.
Regarding lawyers or accountants I think they should limit the duration of their careers. Maybe 20 years is the most a human being should be in that profession because it's obvious it has long term lasting effects. Now, I'm talking seriously here: we should promote career mobility.
We're all tiny hydrogen nuclei churning around in the high-pressure stellar core of our corporate psychic prisons, waiting until we burn up or the whole things goes nova and the cycle can repeat.
Your optimism is commendable. I've become terminally jaded myself after reading this essay [0], juiciest bit quoted below.
[...] a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.
I kind of picked half-way, I try and find small software businesses that are profitable and working on real world problems. Small as in 5-10 employees. Ecommerce has a lot of small business, grass-roots opportunities still, since commerce is such a core value of any society. Pays less, but I feel better.
Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”
But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.
There are many gods, but this one is ours."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The reason first-year attorneys are unhappy is because their jobs are difficult, insecure, and yet necessary to paying off their often large law school student debts. There's also an expectation of immediate availability and, depending on the firm, there can be a culture of viciously attacking juniors for any oversights (nominally to train lawyers not to make them, though it's open season for generally sadistic people).
First years typically start with about a quarter million in law school debt into a job where taking more that 30 minutes to respond to an email is unacceptable. That's why they're stressed.