What you are writing is another version of water/diamonds story. Basically WTF happened that diamonds, which nobody needs, are worth a lot, but water, which everyone needs, costs basically nothing?

The answer was something called marginalism. Well worth reading about, and I can't do justice to it in a few sentences.

Of course marginalism itself requires you to think about value in a certain way, often a very technical way (eg von Neuman-Morgenstern) that makes you forget that there are sometimes contradictions in how we think about value.