How do I make peace with a career spent optimizing production?

You can design any process, and after years of it a quiet question has surfaced: what did all that optimizing actually build? That question is not a crisis. It is the sign of a thoughtful person looking honestly at their life's work. Most people never dare to ask it. The truth is that the value of your work is often invisible to you because you stand so close to it. The plants you designed made things people used, kept people employed, turned raw material into something useful. You may never see the far end of that chain, but it is real, and you were a link in it. If the question keeps returning, follow it gently. Pick one thing you helped make and trace where it went, who it reached. You do not need a grand answer. You need one concrete example that reminds you the work touched real lives. Meaning is usually there. You just have to go looking for it.