Thank you, and I have to say your sentence right here is a key understanding:

"I am letting other people decide the value of what I create for me based on what they judge the reward value should be."

Those who believe markets are "perfect magical calculators" are taking a good idea, which is the concept of a market, and putting it on a pedestal it does not belong on. Yes, markets can indeed put a price on things, and in so doing function incredibly to leverage scarce resources to maximum effect in certain cases, but in other cases, markets can also fail miserably at determining value.

I think a prime example is any well-known artist who only became well-known after death, and died poor. A single painting that sells for $1 million dollars apparently reflects the art itself as a work of genius, but the work itself didn't change. It's the same piece of work that the artist couldn't sell during their lifetime, or sold for like $5 perhaps.

Now imagine the person who sells such a painting. Perhaps someone who buys a painting for $500,000 and sells it later for $1 million... did they add $500,000 in value to the painting? Compare this $500,000 as being perhaps 10 times more than the artist who painted it earned off their painting during their entire lifetime. Is the act of selling on their painting more valuable than the act of creating that painting and every other painting that artist ever created? Of course not! But there are definitely those who will conclude that based on the numbers.

We do not at all value extremely important work sufficiently. Did you know 1/3 of Americans are putting in 1.2 billion hours per week of unpaid care work? It's value if paid is estimated as being about $700 billion per year, or 5% of GDP that's missing from GDP, if it were calculated into it.

Why is that work not considered work, and therefore not even valuable, when the same work that does get paid is considered as valuable?

Here's another question. Imagine a small community of five houses, each with one parent, each with one kid, where each parent pays one of the parents for daycare so they can work doing daycare for another parent. Economists would consider this as full employment. Every one has a job, and that job is adding to GDP. Now what if each parent stayed home and raised their own kid? This would be example of full unemployment, with nothing added to GDP, and yet the nature of the work and the time involved is exactly the same. But which example is most likely to lead to better adults decades later? The one where everyone was raised by someone else other than their parent? Or the one where everyone was raised by their parent?

I think society needs to look in the mirror and recognize what isn't being recognized, and redefine what it considers to be work, and what it values. I also think that forcing people to work with the threat of poverty looming over everyone, and even dragging and keeping people down in poverty, is preventing a great deal of work from being done and value being created.

Imagine if only one new Einstein is out there working three dead-end jobs 70 hours per week in the hopes of preventing their family from living in poverty or trying to get them out of it if they're in it... how do we calculate that loss of value to society? How do we even calculate what value Einstein himself added to society?

Once we start thinking about how poorly we judge value, and how much value is being hindered and prevented by a system not built on Level 3 of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs instead of Level 0, it's hard not to see the immediate need for implementing basic income.