It has its flaws but on the whole it works. Certainly in the cases I'm thinking of my industry was producing value and I was producing value to the industry.
> Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?
Yes, much more. Try watching old films, playing old games. There are a few gems but there's a lot of awfulness, and even more than that, even in the good ones everything's so slow.
You seem to be confused to the point that you assume that value can only exist if you personally find anything to be of any value and only in the long run. That's not how the world works. Value is subjective and everyone has their particular needs at each point in time. I don't go buy speedos in the dead of winter or skis in august, nor I'm going to spend money on a show or a book that doesn't interest me. Does that mean that any of those things has any value?of course not.
Keep going and the beast feeds it's self with communication overhead requiring a lot of office workers.
Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator.
Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?