What's important to note is that there are different levels of wealth that come with different baggage to them and leave people with a different outlook on the future. This is a bit of a generalization and won't cover everyone, but it is a reflection of what a large enough number of people go through.

Poverty has different shades to it. It's not just the people that have no place else to live but in the streets. It's those who could afford to live under a roof, those who at one time thought they could afford to raise a family. People who end up living day to day, never truly being sure if they could manage the next one.
Money, for them, is one of the most precious things possible. Because what happens when your child gets sick, and you can't afford medicine? What happens when a water pipe bursts, and you can't afford to fix it? What happens when you can't afford to pay the heating bill in the winter? Doom. Nothing short of it. And living with that, day after day, in that mentality, molds you into a way of life where there is nothing after tomorrow. There's no such thing as planning for the future, there's just surviving. If you stay there long enough, there's no coming out no matter how your financial situation changes. That's what you see very often from people winning big at the lottery. They have no framework for what to do with that money because they aren't conditioned to see past tomorrow. That's basically half our country. That's me for half my life.

When you go up a peg in wealth, you're in the situation where money really doesn't become the dominant factor, because you have enough of it so that it doesn't register as a desperate need. It's there. Like running water or indoor plumbing. Both are fantastic, marvelous, but if you grew up with them, they don't seem as fantastic as they would to someone that either had to contend with a smelly bucket in the winter, or dressing warmly and shoveling snow in the middle of the night just to get to the toilet.
It's in this level of wealth that chasing money doesn't make much sense, where you have the freedom to actualize and improve yourself, form relationships and grow as a person to the point where even if things start going bad, you're not trapped in the mindset of doom after tomorrow. You know there's a way out, you've seen it, you've been there. In that way, money does help you thrive. It lets you do what you want, what you are good at, what you can best help others as.

Then we get to the higher level of wealth. Here you basically have more money than you know what to do with. As I previously said, some people get here suddenly, unprepared, and just spend it all on frivolous things without any idea of what to actually do with it. Coming from the mindset that there is a day after tomorrow, that there is such a thing as a long term future will prepare you for what to do with such money. And in the best of cases it leads to people giving back to the community in the form of creating value for others. Businesses, jobs, investing in public infrastructure, sanitation, health, even charities. Because you're in a place where you realize that money won't bring you more happiness, but it can sure lessen the suffering of others. And that is a journey onto itself. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you get people buying Buggati Veiron's in a country with no serious highway infrastructure. You get people who believe that showing others how wealthy you are is the only reason to have wealth.

At least that's my take on things. I've been slowly worming my way out of the first category over the past decade and a half, and I gotta say that not needing to worry about money is doing a lot more than helping me survive.