Every unhappy profession is unhappy in its own way.
"Lawyers," as Susan Beck observes in THE AMERICAN LAWYER, "have been unhappy for a long time." That unhappiness usually takes the form of being compelled to bill a tremendous amount of hours, having to deal with the ambiguity that law is along with the nastiness of a system that's adversarial, and the self-hate which usually accompanies the compulsion for achievement.
Academics, another field I was in, are unhappy in different ways. And we all know about psychologists and psychiatrists, a field I tried out, who are said to enter that field of work to solve their own emotional difficulties and often don't succeed at that.
Despite the different forms of unhappiness different professions cause, lead to, come with, we in them have control over where, how and when we will work. Professional life isn't an ossified layer of hell in Dante's "Divine Comedy."
For instance, lawyers such as those at Rimon, a virtual shop that charges less, have been creating models that lessen the negatives of the profession for them and even increase the satisfactions. Yeah, law can be very intellectually stimulating and isn't it wonderful to problem-solve for clients.
Professors, even in that field where there tend to be few jobs, have been known to put together powerful brandnames. That makes the Administration less likely to mess with them and other employers more likely to seek them out.
Those in the mental-health field, who come to understand themselves, can opt out of direct hands-on service and administer, write, research or even walk the earth as gurus. The trick is self-knowledge, which in itself is a form of self-healing.
In short, it's not the profession. It's the members. In my discipline of public relations, more of us are refusing the sweat shops of agency work and the groupthink of corporate. We take the risk of flying solo or in small groups out there. Like the folks at Rimon, we even see ourselves establishing an alternative to the worst of our fields.