It shouldn't be a surprise that, as a result, many people prioritize having enough money to not have to care about not having money.
What I have landed on is that achieving "financial independence" is important to me because it buys time, but beyond that point I don't care. Or maybe a better, though jargon-y, way to put it is that it buys optionality, and that I value that very highly (and I think most people do).
I really like working. And I really like spending time with my family. What I really dislike is when I have to spend more time working, rather than being with my family, than I want to, in order to avoid that asceticism that I hate. And, having not yet achieved financial independence, that's pretty much always the case, because I need to work full time, and that's more than I want to work.
Financial independence also buys optionality in what kind of work I can do. Right now there is some stuff I'm really interested in that I would love to be working on in an academic setting, rather than a commercial setting. But I can't afford to do that, because the pay would not be good enough. And at other times, I've really wished I could afford to do work I would find valuable but which is just not well compensated; teaching, tutoring, community / public sector work, etc. But I haven't been able to afford to, thus far.
But of course the problem with all this is that "financial independence" is a very fuzzy line, and is a function of spending, and spending is often itself a function of income. So avoiding that trap is also important to me, and I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be.