Hmm, that last part undermines the point. It's more interesting to think about separating the worth of an action (even in a spiritual sense) from the consequences of the action.
But I'm way too tired to explore that in multiple long paragraphs here heh.
But in case you think it's a childish way to justify doing whatever we want, think of it like this, let's say I save someone's life, a person who goes on to do bad things. We don't weigh the good and bad actions of his life up to decide whether my saving his life was correct, we can judge my action itself.
After you remove consequences you can similarly remove traditions and societal values (we can imagine "bad" societies as well as any number of non-ideal ones).
So you can continue to strip these away, but you can't strip away how you felt about it at the time. How you feel in the present is sort of the "I think therefore I am" analogue of value, i.e. some kind of fundamental impervious object.
Once I spent at least 30 minutes (maybe more like an hour) trying to solve a pawn endgame.
After I thought I had done a pretty good analysis, I checked the book's analysis (which was extensive), and I had screwed up... so then I reviewed the book's analysis + what I'd analyzed to come up with some lessons and I tried to understand the position and the important points of it all...
... because there was a similar pawn position in a different book that I remembered that I wanted to try to solve. So I tried to use what I learned on that position... and failed... but I failed in a really annoying way... the concepts and key points I'd spent so much time extracting from the first position didn't actually apply to the very similar looking position from the 2nd book.
So then I had to try and understand the difference between the two positions, and why certain ideas won in one instance but failed in another... and this was a pretty annoying exercise, but in the end I finally worked out some answers I was satisfied with.
The whole thing took, I don't know... 4 hours.
Was it worth it, in terms of chess? Probably not... I think the moral of the story is I like puzzles, and sometimes I don't know when to give up and I spend too much time on a problem (this would have been better to spread out over a few days at least).
Well, there have been forum posts and threads devoted to the question of whether playing and studying chess extensively is worth it in terms of spending one's time in this limited life we all have. That's a hard existential and spiritual question.
But is spending 4 hours differentiating between 2 pawn endgame positions worth it in terms of chess knowledge which hopefully leads to improvement in game performance? I don't know.
Maybe one can rationalize the training exercise as a serious cognitive effort to prevent future Alzheimer's.
Or you can tell your loved ones that you studying chess is cheaper and better than you being a drug addict.
Yeah, I don't know.
If you asked a really old person, or if I were looking back on it, bedridden, in my nursing home... maybe the wisdom is that the only things worth doing in life are the things we genuinely enjoyed doing at the time
(the "really old" stipulation implying we didn't seriously hurt ourselves or others)