A large part of this is how money is not really integrated into their society. It seems really natural for us to consider tokens of value to have meaning, but wealth takes many forms.
Therein lies the problem it may be: we have become lost in abstraction and confuse money with real wealth. It's like we can never get enough because we are starving ourselves eating the menus instead of the dinner while at the same time not realizing that there is only so much dinner one can eat before becoming sick.
The more we rely upon abstraction, the more disconnected we become from the reality which that abstraction is supposed to represent.