Seeking Money For Its Own Sake

Money is one of the most prominent aspects of Western culture, something that many people look to for security of various kinds.  Without money, it is impossible to thrive in a modern setting.  What is possible is accumulating and spending money without believing in the many asinine fallacies and false ideas others might point to.  Some realize money is a merely a means to an end, while others seek it as if it imbues some objective significance into their lives beyond practical stability.  Accumulating money for the sake of accumulating money, rather than for the sake of personal security, the sake of pursuing pleasures money can help obtain, or for the sake of generosity, is one of the shallowest and most pointless things a person could live for.

To base life around money even beyond the practical pursuit of buying things like food or other needed resources, obtaining non-vital experiences or possessions one could not otherwise have, and saving for potential crises in one's life is to enslave oneself to a mere social construct.  There are few things as petty and insignificant as making a social construct the center of one's priorities in the first place, but making a social construct what one's life revolves around for its own end and not as a means to something deeper and more philosophically substantial is the most superficial approach to money possible.  One must look beyond money to find something that philosophically or personally merits more attention.

The things money can provide access to--such as health, which frees one to more directly pursue other things of greater depth, or security, which also frees one to more directly pursue things of more substance--already have more philosophical and personal significance than money itself, and only a fool would believe otherwise.  Even a philosophically unexamined priority of security or personal flourishing has more to offer than a blind fixation on money for no reason other than to fixate on money!  Someone who obsesses over money to a gratuitous extent deserves dismissal and contempt instead of respect.  The very nature of money, as a mere social construct used to purchase other things, is no higher than that of a tool used as a stepping stone.

Money is at most a means to an end and nothing more.  Someone who recognizes this is already more intelligent than someone who truly holds that the opposite is true, which means they are already a deeper person than the latter or they at least have more immediate potential for depth.  Money itself cannot have any significance unless other things have greater significance already.  If anything at all matters, it is rooted in something other than monetary gain: it is rooted in truth itself.  If truth does not matter, nothing does, including money and all of the things it can buy; if money does not matter in some ultimate existential sense, truth still can have significance in a sense beyond the fact that it is reality whether people like it or not.  Either way, money is far from having a status of utmost importance.