Maybe the personal interests are the real utility, but we don't want to admit it -- because for our survival as members of social species it is better to pretend that our utility is aligned with utility of others, although it is probably just weakly positively correlated. In more complex society the correlation is probably even weaker, because the choicespace is larger.

Or maybe just the utility choice mechanism is broken in this society, because it evolved in an ancient environment. It probably uses some mechanism like "if you are rewarded for doing something, or if you see that someone is rewarded for something, then develop a strong desire... and keep the desire even in times when you are not rewarded (because it may require long-term effort)". In ancient environment you would see rewards mostly for useful things. Today there are too many exciting things -- I don't say they are mostly bad, just that there is too much of them, so people's utility functions are spread too much, and sometimes there are not enough people with desire to do some critical tasks.