Yeah, so basically your saying it doesn't really matter, utility is relative. And even people who think they are providing utility like in a corporate structure, aren't even really.
Well it
may matter. For instance if a lot of people value the cumulation and sharing of knowledge, then society is going to need infrastructure for that. There need to be libraries, computers, internets, fiber optic cables buried under ground, power stations, extraction industries to fabricate raw materials for whatever is needed to make electricity, etc. Quite a bit of tangible stuff to keep the intangibles of human collective memory humming along.
But the specific guy climbing up the telephone pole may jolly well be wasting his time, because his boss is a Dilbert and doesn't organize these things well.
If there's a perfectly efficient way of doing thing X, then a "Productivity" function might be some % not accomplished due to risks in the universe. Like the risk of not knowing what you're doing, or for telephone poles to blow down. I'm saying people's actual productive output is highly variable and doesn't match their narratives of being good diligent societally fulfilling worker bees.
When you run your own homestead, you take all those risks yourself. You find out what you can live with and what you cannot. For instance, I live out of my car with my dog. This lifestyle requires that I keep my car running. Consequently I am an amateur auto mechanic.
Another interesting problem with "utility" is you can't stop people from adulating some "rock star" by giving them tons of money. Any kind of entertainer who's sufficiently entertaining can make a mint. That's the problem with conceiving the world in terms of dull ideas and duties: people actually need to be entertained. They will pay for it. They will pay excessively for it, in a societal organizing sense.
Like the 1 guy who started Minecraft by working on some crap Java code for 1 year. It became a phenom. When he sold the company to Microsoft several years later, it was worth $2.5 billion. And personally I think this guy's game sucks. It's not even a game, it's more of a sandbox with blocks. But a lot of people found themselves very entertained by this sandbox with blocks.
I don't think he contributed much to humanity and will never duplicate that level of success again. I don't think he has any real chops as a game designer. Even worse, having gotten so much money, he seems to have no public idea of how to use it to better anything about the human condition. So far his phenomenon of economic success looks like a complete waste of time, a glorification of the Capitalist system and its distribution networks. He has been granted excess; he doesn't seem to know what to do with it.
If he did have real chops as a game designer, there would still be the question of excess, vs. bettering humanity.
