How does one write something like this?
I get the interest, and the review process. What I mean is, is this a hobby where someone is passionate about soothing, or does some employers allow people to work on side projects?
I feel my life is mostly about direct value, and I don't really understand where I went wrong in the path for meaningful knowledge.
Any philosophical help will be very welcome, as you correctly guest I'm a bit lost.
I'd encourage you to generally ignore whether something has direct value or not because that's not how knowledge works. For example, I once spent well over a month implementing the NthWeekday function using nothing but basic arithmetic operations. This would allow us to calculate all federal holidays for a given year at runtime instead of precalculating the values and storing them in a table (which I hated, because it meant that someone had to maintain that table). This hyper-specific problem has near-zero direct value, but it was THE project that sparked my passion for maths.