The Rational Motivation For Accruing Wealth

Wealth can be far broader than money alone, encompassing all other kinds of physical possessions.  It is still money rather than extended wealth that most people directly work for in their jobs, spending that money on other belongings or saving it as needed or desired.  While striving for some measure of wealth, even if only to immediately spend it on necessities, is a basic but major part of living connected with modern society instead of directly relying on laboring in nature to create personal shelter, to obtain food, and to drink water, there is only one core type of rational motivation for accruing wealth that branches off into a handful of subcategories.  The majority of motivations people have for pursuing wealth are merely about personal power--not power for the means of promoting awareness of some grand truth or to enforce any moral obligation--or the mistaken idea that money can alter the very nature of reality, or maybe the idea that it will bring people the genuine social affection they might long for.  They might want to impress others so they can be noticed or feel empowered for a handful of fleeting moments, bent on acting as if the approval of others could posibly have any value outside of the approval of rationalists.  This is living for social constructs and subjective whims.

Social constructs in the sense of assumed or contrived ideas are inherently meaningless, for consensus, tradition, usefulness, and subjective approval neither ground nor reveal truth, and the idea that impressing the subjective perceptions of other people could possibly be obligatory or special in the first place is irrational.  Stupid and shallow people waste their lives holding to the myth that pleasing other people in itself matters.  Having a subjective gravitation towards wanting to impress others might be involuntary and not dependent on one's beliefs or knowledge of reality, as even people who have the desire to please or impress others can still realize the truth about every issue and the irrationality of believing anything at all on the basis of hoping to fit in with others.  One of many ramifications of this is that earning money to attract positive attention from other people is an invalid motivation and that everyone, no matter their personality, upbringing, or cultural status, can realize this.

Some people might even devote much thought and intentionality to trying to appease the judgment of strangers, of people they do not even personally know.  They might never see or speak with these people ever again, and yet they crave a few moments of their approval, although the strangers might not be paying attention to them whatsoever.  In a world full of strangers, such a person will often find himself or herself in the presence of individuals they do not know unless they have a very particular kind of lifestyle.  Money is one of many things that can get pursued as a way to "win" this affection, attention, or acknowledgment from others, yet this approach to community is inescapably rooted in ignoring the fundamental logical fact that the approval of other people is meaningless in itself, having nothing to do with truth, epistemological verification, or the core of reality.

At the same time, money is itself a social construct not in the sense of an erroneous idea embraced by a society or even a true idea embraced by a culture on irrationalistic grounds, but in the sense of something that cannot exist apart from a culture.  Without some sort of civilization, large or small, there would be no such thing as money; there would be no need to use anything like coins or cattle or bills as a means of exchange because there would be no one to trade or share wealth with.  Even if the materials used to form conventional currencies or natural items that can be used as money still existed, they could not be used for this purpose without a buyer and a seller.  In the context of societies, money, even if it takes forms that would not be experientially familiar to moderners, is used to trade with others for products, services, or their time as workers.  It has no other use in itself, despite people pretending like they could not realize from reason alone that money cannot free us of our epistemological limitations, grant us rationalistic knowledge, heal the deepest psychological scars, or even keep us immersed in the luxuries of Earth for anything more than a lifetime.

To live for money instead of using money as a means to morally permissible yet personally necessary or desirable ends is indeed nothing more than a deep delusion.  To look to money for anything more than this is to long for the logically impossible, for not even a restructuring of society changes the nature of money, a social construct that can be used to improve or devastate the quality of someone's life.  Again, to pursue money to appear successful for the sake of other people's incomplete view of one's life, especially if they are strangers, is to misunderstand reason, money, and oneself, or to know the truth and disregard it.  There is no other rational motivation to earn money than to enable one's survival or comfort, the survival or comfort of others (especially dependents), or to derive a sense of accomplishment as long as it is not marred by emotionalism, greed, or the stupidity of philosophical apathy.  Earning money to impress other people, in particular people one barely knows, is an intrinsic stupidity no matter how much security money can bring.