I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team.
I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.
Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.
After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.
I work for a small startup and really enjoy my job, honestly. Definitely have a ton of autonomy.
And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing.
My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company.
When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.
I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations.
It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare.
So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on.
So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.
I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.
Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.
After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.