It must be nice for Kent to just trot off and investigate whether or not his work "matters". For the rest of us, this is a non starter because that effort can't be captured in a story or a task attached to a story on the Jira board. Us mortals might be able to convince our boss that our investigation is worthy of a spike but it'd be bounded to a couple of hours. For us dark matter engineers we need to tell ourselves that, because we're paid, our work "matters".