Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people obsessing over the meaning of life. Let me tell you straight: don’t overthink it. The core is one word: making money.

This isn’t something I’m saying—this is reality talking. Hospitals don’t care whether you’re a good person or a bad person; they only care whether you have money. Your kindness, your network, your love—none of it even gets a place in the conversation. People who are short on money get to experience the ugliest side of human nature. Others will nitpick you, question you, mock your failures, as if your suffering is your own fault.

Now flip it around and look at people with money: wherever they go, they’re met with smiles; people listen when they speak; whatever they do goes smoothly. It’s not fair, but that’s reality. At its core, this world is a game of money—everyone is competing for resources, and everyone has survival problems to solve. If you don’t create value and don’t make money, then in society and even at home, you’ll automatically be labeled as “useless.”

The most painful part is this: if you don’t have the ability to earn independently, then you can only attach yourself to other people and read people’s faces everywhere you go. Once a person is poor, their ambition gets shorter; all day long they think about how to please the boss, how to make coworkers satisfied. Freedom and independence? For most people, that’s a luxury item.

So why can’t so many people make money? To put it bluntly, it’s because their moral sense is too strong. They feel like they can’t do this and can’t do that—endless excuses, endless avoidance. Some people have all their headspace taken up by playing around, and by the time they’re in their seventies or eighties, they’re still the same. Forcing them to make money is like peeling off a layer of skin—it feels unbearable. The best help you can give them is a stable job: earn a paycheck honestly, and do a few trivial things.

I’ve found that caring about face is the biggest enemy of making money. A lot of people can’t stand the phrase “no shame.” But if you look at it from another angle, “no shame” is “selflessness”—and it’s a very high level. Real powerhouses care about getting things done; ordinary people care about whether they look good. People who can make big money are basically not some “good people,” but they slowly grow their business until they and their families can live well.

In this era, how could someone who works hard, loves learning, and is humble possibly not make money? Beautiful women aren’t rare; the truly rare ones are the people who can make big money. Making money is a reflection of someone’s overall strength. Those who can make money are the real experts. Their brains, emotional intelligence, and resilience aren’t things ordinary people can compare with. Those who can’t make money—no matter how diligent or smart they seem on the surface—turn out to be paper tigers once you look deeper.

Making money is actually the best kind of training, the process of rebirth and coming back stronger. Strong people will enjoy the pain and hardships along the way. The real sense of ease comes from the tension and high intensity of the past. Those bright, shining days are the results of challenging yourself again and again. Sitting around doing nothing only brings pain; focusing on one thing is what brings flow and a sense of happiness.

Once you’ve tried the taste of making money, you can never go back to that kind of life where you passively wait and get arranged by everyone else. Only by putting all your energy into making money can your worries and confusion be truly cured. Doing too many things that have nothing to do with making money will only bring endless trouble. If you ignore making money, what awaits you is nothing but life fully calling the shots.