Nice write up.
Yet, we don't matter enough to ourselves to do what we need to practically do to feel valuable
We don't live in a value added system anymore. There use to be a time when working forty hours a week brought you the prospects of those little pink houses for you and me as John Cougar Mellencamp sings. Now people are lucky after working sixty hours a week they have a house to come home to, if they do they have to worry if they have enough food, if they can pay the utility bills. That's just starting at the basic foundations laid for the reason you seek value added work. Work itself comes with a whole host of other problems, it isn't just the lack of pay. The system now is even worse than when I was working full time, it's all geared toward the benefit of a few.
It is part of the great crushing and we are also to blame for it, as what we demand tends to support the economy as it is now, not what it was before. The most valuable businesses need the least amount of people and where we put most of our income, isn't into the jobs that require a lot of people to work. It is a spiral down loop.