nearly the entirety of what I do...You are not even hardly alone. And while I suspect the PoV is prevalent in IT, it's hardly specific to it.
There's a guy who wrote a book about this so long ago that we don't remember his name. He's known only as "the preacher", sometimes as "the teacher" or "the gatherer".
It's Ecclesiastes, in the old testament of the Bible, and begins with "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
I'm quite an atheist, not religious, and generally not given to quoting scripture. I find this particular book exceptionally insightful.
Much of what you describe is in fact reality for most people -- we "follow the money for survival", but the purpose of it all quite frequently eludes me.
I started asking myself two or three years back, "what are the really big problems", largely as I saw that the areas in which they _might_ be addressed, both in Silicon Valley and in the not-for-profit world, there was little real focus on them. I've pursued that question to a series of others (you can find my list elsewhere, though I encourage you to come up with your own set -- I'll tip you to mine if requested).
My interest initially (and still principally) has been focusing on asking the right questions -- which I feel a great many disciplines and ideologies have not been doing. Having settled on at least a few of the major ones, I'm exploring their dynamics and trying to come to answers, though those are even harder.
It's been an interesting inquiry, and it's illuminated to me at least why the problem exists -- that Life (and its activities) seeks out and exploits entropic gradients, reduces them, and either continues to something else or dies out.
You'll find that concept in the Darwin-Lotka Energy Law, named by ecologist Howard Odum in the 1970s, and more recently in the work of UK physicist Jeremy England. Both conclude that evolution is actually a process which maximizes net power throughput -- a case which if true explains a great many paradoxes of human existence.
But it does raise the question of what humans do after we've exploited the current set of entropy gradients -- fossil fuels, mineral resources, topsoil and freshwater resources. A question Odum posed in the 1970s and which I arrived at independently in the late 1980s (I found Odum's version, in Environment, Power, and Society only in the past year).
But yes, it's a very curious situation.