Passing thought: maybe they're right. Government inaction has made it worse.
But at the same time... If you don't pull the lever, thereby passively allowing the trolley to run over a bunch of people as a result of your inaction, are you really "controlling" the trolley?
Training then: Making all the new hires sit down and listen to a recording of you get increasingly frustrated with their dumbass coworker.
Training now: Burning through a neighborhood's worth of power for data processing to ensure that the phone tree understands you with absolute certainty when you say "speak to a representative", yet continues to ignore you anyway.
Get a load of this!! Get a load of this!!
I'd say stage 4 is being the keystone attendee: if you don't go, the whole thing falls apart. Even if you somehow manage to get out of the meeting, it has to get rescheduled because it "needs" your input. The meeting thus becomes inescapable.
Stage 5 is when everyone else realizes you're in stage 4 and begins to cater to your availability and preferences. Obviously this is mostly theoretical.
A bus pass maybe, that way you can just get on and not have to fumble around paying the fare when you board.
Continuing with the analogy, even the honest attempts to fix Mondays are characterized as impractical, idle fantasies.
How about we don't schedule critical meetings to start first thing Monday morning? Even if that's the "only" time everyone can meet? And if it's really the only time everyone has available, doesn't that warrant questioning a bit?
Or what if we just start later on Mondays? And maybe we consider not offsetting it but working later on other days? 39-hour week? 36-hour week?
The key point is that if it's not signed, it gives them an excuse to throw it away.
Do that to enough people and you end up with a big problem. The uncounted votes could swing the election, or you get a messy court case where some judges step in and basically decide the election on their own, or who knows what else.
At a minimum, it's sets the stage for chaos. And from the chaos can emerge a chaotic outcome.
Side note: do I have this right? You can actually picture a time in the foreseeable future where you never have to use Excel again?
If so, I am soooo deeply envious of you :P
Already lots of great answers, but I'll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.
Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.
It's like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it's so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.
If you're having a hard time finding Bort merch, the reason is obvious: they keep selling out before you get there.
Imagine a universe where plants were responsible for modern climate change, Earth Day celebrated deforestation, and Impossible Foods was developing this monster fiber-chicken.
Wasn't this man fined a gazillion dollars? How is he still able to say things and have me hear about them?