From personal experience here's my thoughts on this:
but how I've always seen it, the lower the better if you're not lazy.
Commendable, but in the business world it's all about time & money. If it takes you say 3 months to develop a product in Language 'A', and 12 months in Language 'B' which is also harder to maintain, most companies will tell you to use Language 'A', whether you're a fan of it or not.
Assembly's performance & size edge is also disappearing vs what compilers are generating from say C++. IMHO The good old days of bitshifting to multiply and other inline assembly tricks are, except for perhaps a very narrow & specialized field, behind us. That of course doesn't mean it's not fun to write a windows app in ASM anyway just because you can (i'm guilty of that

)
With how 'cheap' processing power & storage space have become, speed & size of applications are no longer the issue they once were (which also unfortunately creates 'lazy' programmers who have no idea about efficient algorithms etc) so the entire market is definitely moving upwards towards more high-level development & the 'web' side of things.
We're moving away from low-level, direct hardware access to layers upon layers (& sandboxes) of abstract APIs and containers, all to shield the developer from what's really going on under the hood, and going towards a more distributed computing type of development.
As far as what languages to learn etc it all depends on what you like to do and where you like to go.
There's quite a difference between a Web Developer, Application Developer, Systems Developer, Embedded Developer etc,etc. The "Hot Thing" right now is definitely Web Development (Probably a 5-1 ratio of Web Dev positions available vs Desktop development).
Even within those broad categories there's tons of subcategories. Plaftorms like .NET actually try to bridge some of these areas since you can do Windows or Web development in any of the .NET languages which make it easier for devs to both tasks if they're familiar with one or the other (though some concepts are different; e.g. most desktop-only devs would've never heard of a postback or how it's used).
I've done both web & desktop development on several platforms (windows,*nix etc) over the years and I simply prefer 'desktop' or embedded development, just like I prefer C++/C# over Java or VB (reading/writing VB literally gives me a headache.. like it's a right brain/left brain kind of thing lol). But it doesn't hurt to know them anyway so that when I want to write an app for my Droid phone I can just fire up Eclipse and bang out some Java.
The one thing to indeed realize is that you are never done learning in the computer industry - while concepts, design patterns carry over the languages change over time (sometimes rapidly) and either become surpassed or irellevant.. (e.g. COBOL - while once the 'hot language' for business apps & still running in legacy apps here or there, barely any new development is done in it compared to any of the other languages). Some of things I studied when I got my degree I still work with practically every day, while others I haven't touched in over a decade. C# didn't even exist back then, and now I spend 95% of my time developing in it. I still love my C++, but for what I do on a daily basis (windows apps) it's actually faster for me to develop in C# than C++. 10 years from now C# will probably be old & outdated and we'll be working in Z# (F# is already out there

).
If you like C++ and want to keep working with it, don't stop. It will only help your foundation of software engineering which you can apply to any language you choose to pick up later on. There are also still PLENTY of markets & Jobs that require raw power C++, low level direct hardware access etc etc.
But no matter what you choose, 'Web or Windows' so to speak, if you were to pursue software development as a career, i'm sure you'll be able to find some employment somewhere (if you have the proven skills etc). Just looking at dice.com a few simple searches find: C# (6289 jobs), .NET (7727 Jobs), C++ (5734 jobs), Java (13033 jobs), Visual basic (1464 jobs), PHP (2226 Jobs).