The miscommunication in that case is that the person doing the boulder-rolling/book-writing/startup-programming genuinely thought they were providing value to society. Your example picks a ridiculous non-valuable labor. To understand their point of view, imagine something that you would consider valuable, but which goes generally unrewarded. To get you started: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, volunteering for a fire department, cleaning an oil spill, rescuing animals, planting trees to reduce man-made erosion, ...