It's difficult enough to spend 1000's of hours on honing my craft. How can I possibly justify that sort of investment in meditation?
If you tell me it helps those with sleep issues, mental blocks, psychological issues, or addiction, your point is well taken and understood. But for those of us blessed to be in relatively sound mind, how will we benefit from meditation?
Put more simply; when you’re doing the dishes, do the dishes. Focus on the sensation of the water on your hands and the movement of your muscles as you scrub and dry them. When your mind wanders away from that as it tends to do, acknowledge that your mind has wandered and gently bring it back to what you’re doing. That’s meditation.
Likewise, when you’re working on honing your craft, notice when your mind wanders away from the task at hand and gently bring it back in focus when that happens without judgement.
You’ll find that doing this will help you hone your craft in ways you’ve never considered.
I believe that's you you achieve 7 years worth of meditation
It is true that some traditions (including the burgeoning recent trend of secular meditation) emphasise mindfulness in daily life, particularly for lay persons. But the studies showing huge differences in mental activity have done so in 'Olympic-level meditators'. These people have made deliberate meditation practice the focus of their lives.
https://github.com/deobald/vipassana-for-hackers/blob/master...
I guess the answer to your question is, do you want to understand how your mind / consciousness works? It makes sense to understand how a computer works of you do any sort of programming. Wouldn't you want to understand how your mind works as well as you use it constantly?
I'd say meditation has a few distinct key benefits, and it's reasonable to decide none of these are worth it for you at this point in your life (or ever):
(1) It helps you tame your mind when it goes down an unproductive path. This alleviates the ailments you mentioned (sleep disorders, depression, anxiety, etc), and provides an overall sense of peace and joy. You may not suffer much from these.
(2) It helps provides a comfortable detachment from your emotions and attachments. This helps with restraining your desires, improving your relationships, and making calmer and more rational decisions even when emotions are high. In other words, this helps narrow the distance between who your values want you to be (e.g. humble, thoughtful, calm under pressure, selfless) and how you act day-to-day. You may be doing just fine with these.
(3) It can satisfy the need for fulfillment and meaning in a more stable way than anything else. Many people have something that guides them and provides long-term or lifelong fulfillment (a long-term goal, religious beliefs, etc), and IME meditation can provide the most stable source of satisfying this need (this is dark, but even if providing for your family provides this need for you, your family may die or you may become alienated from them). It does this by essentially uprooting that need on a fundamental level (at least, that's the Buddhist tradition's explanation of why it has that outcome). You may feel fine with the small anguish or small risk of anguish that occurs in moments of your life where your meaning and fulfillment come into question, or you may feel relatively positive they never will (e.g. if it primarily is sourced from strong religious conviction).
(4) It helps you know yourself better. This feeds into (1) and (2), but on a meta level, it also helps you self-evaluate the extent to which (1), (2), and (3) are an issue. It also adds an element of fun and curiosity to meditation once you start to experience it. You may not care about this.
Meditation is the highest form of hacking where you disassemble and modify the processes in your own consciousness.
It's just another craft really.