Clearly it's not Infosec!!! ;)

How do you provide value when that value isn’t needed at the moment?

Well, that's why a lot of people want to change things at a political level - the great "pure competition no safety net" neoliberal take on Society results in most of people, whose job is basically a commodity and who don't have a "unique value proposition", to be pretty close to slaves in this system because since they are human beings and naturally need food, water and shelter continously but are in an environment where the access to those is controlled by having unusual amounts of the very thing that people selling commoditized services cannot get enough of via their work - money - are squezed into a position where they de facto don't have any choices, nor do they even have the necessary space to invest in themselves to change into some other job where they might have a "unique value proposition".

This situation could be changed if people were guaranteed access to the basic essentials, for example via a Universal Basic Income, since even people doing commoditized work would then have the choice to refuse to "sell" their work if they found the "price" too low or the conditions too bad, which would push the market to improve the jobs offers for those (who are by far the majority if people) plus a lot of those could even chose to improve themselves or their skills, become inventors, or artists, or work in areas with high social value but low "price" because they felt rewarded by it in ways other than money.

In summary, I think there is no solution within the current paradygm since it makes this problem systemic and any viable solution requires changing at least some things in the paradygm, most noteably the part were the basic required essentials of human beings are used to, at the systemic level, force most people into a no-true-choice neo-slavery.

The changes we've seen to the paradym in the last decade or two are exactly in the opposite direction: the ever more expensive housing and even destruction of the social safety net are forcing even more people to accept bare-minimum near-slavery work just to survive.