Wealth & Money Quote by Scott Alexander

Alexander’s line flatters ambition while quietly indicting the culture that treats ambition as a personality. Calling money-making a “hobby” is the tell: it rebrands what is usually framed as necessity, status-chasing, or moral compromise into something playful, almost wholesome. A hobby is optional, self-directed, and socially legible. Slotting profit into that category makes it feel less like capitulation and more like self-care. That’s the seduction.

The second move is even sharper: “will complement any other hobbies you have, beautifully.” The adverb matters. “Beautifully” implies not just practicality (more cash buys better gear) but aesthetic harmony, as if wealth is the universal solvent that makes your life story cohere. In that phrasing you can hear a sly nod to the modern condition: we curate identities through interests, but the interests that scale, travel well, and impress others tend to be the ones subsidized by disposable income. Money doesn’t just support your hobbies; it edits them, selects for the ones that look good under capitalism’s lighting.

As a writer associated with rationalist, optimization-minded internet culture, Alexander is also winking at a certain audience: people who like systems, side projects, and “leveling up.” He’s giving permission to treat finance as another craft to master, while smuggling in a critique of how thoroughly economic logic colonizes leisure. The line lands because it’s both a pep talk and a warning: if money-making complements everything, it can also quietly replace everything.