I agree with your comment up to a point. At several points in my life I've dedicated it to recreation and felt great about it. :) I'm not sure that work is onl

I agree with your comment up to a point. At several points in my life I've dedicated it to recreation and felt great about it. :) I'm not sure that work is only valuable for its product, though, unless you expand the definition of "product" to include changes in the worker. There are certain forms of work we realize this about: we call them exercises or practice. But it applies to a lot of work whose point might be primarily understood as production. That isn't the only issue at hand, though. The number of unsolved problems or things that could just use dutiful attention in the world isn't so small that we can just write off hundreds of thousands of people from engagement with them. We seem to have a culture and institutions that increasingly leave a gap between some people and these attentions/duties, though. And that sounds like a problem worth reflecting on.