What should I do with a bad dissertation from a good school? I am a Ph.D. student who is at most two semesters away from graduation at one of the top institutions in the field. My field is not well-funded and can be highly competitive, and I am especially concerned because my dissertation is not very relevant to the field I am interested in(I wrote/presented/am on the way to publish some other research papers that are more relevant to the field of my interest, but these are unrelated to my dissertation), and because I find it very uninspiring and uninteresting; it is based solely on a meta-analysis and not on any actual innovative research. 

I am not intending to publish the dissertation, since I feel that the additional work needed to submit will be simply a waste of time, and I do not want bad research papers to be associated with my name. 

What should I do in order to still look for a postdoc with a bad dissertation? Should I simply give up on academia and attempt to find a different career path?
A good dissertation is a done dissertation. Just get it submitted.

As another person commented, what you do for your postdoc does not have to be directly related to your dissertation. Having done a dissertation just shows that you are capable of research, writing, and going through the process of peer review. I'm sure many people never read the dissertations of the postdocs they hire.