Money is just a means of exchange. But basic human rights such as housing now being monetized and rented out and/or used as an investment means the endless pursuit of money is now mandatory to survive.
Money is an abstraction and that is where humans interpretation starts to diverge. I think that may be this problem in a nutshell: abstractions are always leaky, and they leak in different places for different people.
Now? How did you think housing work for millennia? It not being monetized before is a cold comfort when your labor and agricultural products are taxed directly instead.
Taxation has always been around in one form or another. But property ownership being out of reach of the masses is a relatively new thing.
Not that long ago, a blue collar family could afford to save enough to buy a family home in under a decade. Nowadays most blue-collar people (and in some countries such as the UK, even white collars) have no option but to rent perpetually.
And that's just property, not even taking into account inflation of everything else. Cars (which are necessities in many parts of the world) have also exploded in price, with entry-level models now approaching what high-end executive cars were just 15 years ago.
