Money can buy you happiness, but it's an inefficient exchange mechanism - unless you roll two sixes, the amount of work and bullshit that goes hand in hand with growing your "worth" usually exceeds the reward - and that reward for most is tantalisingly close but always "a year or two" away.
Monetary wealth is a means - it is "gas in the tank" - but it isn't the end. The end is your own happiness and wellbeing, and there are much easier ways to secure this than through wealth.
If I'd known what I know now, I would have moved to a hut up a mountain a decade ago rather than going into business. Now I am responsible for the livelihood of dozens directly, thousands indirectly, and while I may have made myself a very comfortable gilded cage, it is a cage, and the cost of my wealth has been my freedom.