Wealth & Money Quote by Rebecca H. Davis

Money isn’t framed here as a tool or even a temptation, but as a habit - something we’ve “grown used to,” like noise pollution or back pain. Rebecca H. Davis compresses an entire social critique into that one verb: used to. The shock isn’t that people want money; it’s that the wanting has become ordinary, almost invisible, baked into the daily choreography of adulthood. When the handling and “increase” of money becomes “the chief business of life,” Davis is pointing at a quiet regime change: labor, relationships, morality, even leisure get reorganized around accumulation as the default metric of seriousness.

The subtext is less sermon than diagnosis. “Handling” suggests constant contact: counting, budgeting, bargaining, worrying. It’s the managerial mindset applied to existence itself. “Increase” adds the growth imperative - not enough to have, you must scale. Davis’s phrasing implies a culture where stability feels like failure and sufficiency looks naive.

Context matters: Davis wrote from within the pressures of a rapidly industrializing America, where wage labor, urban life, and financial speculation were remaking class identity. Her line catches the moment when capitalism stops being a system you live under and becomes a personality you live as. The “most of us” is the sharpest edge: she refuses to isolate greed as an individual flaw. This is a collective adaptation, a social weather pattern. The critique lands because it’s not dramatic; it’s domestic. It reads like a weary observation from someone watching people confuse survival with striving - and then call it normal.