I don't understand how your job as you described it doesn't fit into "creation of value" from your first paragraph! Actually, my boss regularly does some trivial thing or solves a small problem then announces, "Well, there's the value I added today!" as a joke, but I do actually feel that it's true. (He does more, of course, but those small things *do* add value to the great machine of a company that keeps the greater machine of an economy moving.)
Yes, in the end I think so too. It's just not as obvious as it is in the case of, say, farmers and carpenters, or even artists or teachers. The world itself does not generally look any different because of my work - I'm not feeding or housing anyone or providing useful tools for cutting down trees. A thousand years ago, those kinds of things would make up the vast majority of "work" - hunting, farming, making clothes, building structures, digging minerals and things out of the earth, etc. With today's technology, tools, techniques and so on people can accomplish those tasks so efficiently that most humans don't need to engage in them at all. But all of that technology and so is only available because of our complex society, which requires (as apurplecabbage points out below) a bunch of new tasks to be accomplished - now we need people to spend 40+ hours a week analyzing data about credit card users, or talking to 80 people a day about why they're planning to visit another continent for six months. The things we do wouldn't even
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You said "My work requires a huge level of complexity in society." I would instead say that the huge level of complexity in society requires work such as yours.
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