This connection—between earning money and providing value to others—is something that sounds obvious, but I only really internalized it recently, after reading Kevin Simler's Congolese Trading Window thought experiment[1].

It would be easy to take this line of reasoning into dangerous territory and suppose that earning money is equivalent to being morally virtuous, but this neglects externalities and the sometimes fundamental difficulty of accurately pricing certain kinds of goods (subjective wellbeing, community, a sense of meaning, etc.). Money is, at best, a very rough proxy measure for human value.

[1] http://www.meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/