what do you use your radio for? [noob question]

hi everyone. i've been lurking this forum for a few weeks now since i started thinking about getting into amateur radio. the amount of information on the web is incredible.
one of the problems i find with all of the information is that it requires a bit of knowledge already in order to understand it. yes, i know, studying for the test will explain a lot of things but most of those are technical. bands, antennae, analog & digital, and so on.
what i'm really curious about is what people are actually doing with their radios.
some of the things i have found are:
emergency preparedness, when nothing else is working, hams can still get through so they can be used for communication when phones/internet don't work
conversation, chatting with other hams just for the sake of chatting
seeing how far you can reach, is that what is called contesting or is there another name for seeing how far away you can speak to someone
what else do hams do?

i am curious about a few other things that are about how you use the radio. a couple of big ones are:
how do you reach people? i remember when i was a teen, a friend had a CB radio. there was a channel where people would initiate a conversation. then they would decide on another channel and move their conversation there to free up the the first one. does amateur radio work the same way?
how useful is a radio, handheld ones in particular, in sparsely populated areas? one of my initial thoughts was that if i'm in the middle of nowhere without cell coverage, i could call for help, but now i'm thinking that this is not realistic since the range of a handheld is only a few km. so if i'm not near a repeater then i'm out of luck. how about a car installation?
i have a million more questions running through my mind but i'll leave this here for now. i'd like to get my license but first i want to learn a bit more about what it's all about.
thanks