Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline.

Money is an accounting device, because society has grown too large for the circulation to occur organically, so mechanisms evolved to expand the economic feedback loops.

True. The opposite of, "what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger," would be that what protects us, makes us weaker. All that damn feedback, positive and negative.

If society understood meaning is a function of what you give, rather than what you get, a lot of these problems would dissolve.

The basis of a healthy society is collective responsibility, with rights as reward, but when ours was first being imagined, the irresponsible likely died of starvation, so the debate was about rights. Now it's all about rights and responsibility is what you get stuck with, when things go wrong.

Life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters, is how well you tie the rest of the story together.