But wait. If all they do is empty your trash, and you do nothing worthy of merit, then by extension, that tangible thing they do to support your work is equally meaningless.

If the world economy could eliminate your job without missing it, then you are no longer generating trash to clean up, and that job goes away too. The person who cleans up after someone genuinely productive therefore contributes more than someone who cleans up after someone useless.

This is, no doubt why we pretend with all the might of imagination that certain jobs are critical and vital to the economy. The idea that double-digit percentages of the whole world economy could actually just be wasted on useless navel-gazing nonsense is just too horrible to consider. It may be true, but if we believe it is true, that just means we're all wasting our lives on pointless bullshit. I'd rather lie to myself and be happy, regarding this particular point.

You're free to quit your job and go empty peoples' trash if you really find it so much more meaningful.

His lack of nobility does not invalidate his argument. Arguably, many of the most despised jobs are most important. None of the elite would or could do them, and without society would fall apart. On the other hand, a very large percentage of elite jobs could be eliminated without ill effect.

Our role as the elite is to elevate and recognize their worth, and not sink them to our moral level.

Then this is a poor example. I can certainly empty my own trash - I do that at home. It's far more efficient to have one person with no education or special skills come around and collect everyone's trash into a big container once per day than to have hundreds of skilled, expensive employees empty their own trash when it gets full.

It's as meaningful as it's thankless.

If you're getting paid it means what you're doing means something to someone, even if it doesn't mean anything to you.

But you can empty the trash and they can't build your apps.

Also, when thinking about creating value, you need to think about scale. They change your trash and are limited by their physical ability and time. Let's say they saved you 4 minutes and changed 400 trashes, saving 399 other people 4 minutes. They've created ~24 hours of value.

If your app helps people save 30 seconds a day and did that for 100k people, then you created about 12 days more value.

Your argument can easily go the other way. What if your app wastes 30 seconds a day for 100k people? By, say, building addictive mobile games, or a social network dedicated to watching food pictures, or gambling websites, or, like the parent comment said, throwaway apps.

If an app provides entertainment then it wastes time?

What app does save people 30 seconds? Perhaps they didn't use the app before, and now it's wasting the time of thousands?

At the very least the lady emptying the trash keeps the place hygienic, reducing the spread of diseases.