There are two things that matter in life:

(1) virtue signalling
(2) making money

People will tell you lies about how there are other things that matter, and how well you do in life will depend on how well you resist those lies.

Why does it work like this?

Virtue is the currency of hunter gatherers. Who is the good person? Who is politically connected? Who do people consider high up in the political hierarchy of the tribe?

Money is the industrial-human currency, the currency of one-off interactions between distrustful strangers.

If you are doing something that isn't maximizing one of these two currencies, what are you even doing with your life?

If life was a computer game I would already have quit and reloaded a savefile from when I was 20 and just taken a job in quantitative finance like a sensible person. https://twitter.com/DickFeynman5/status/1362836278157463553

I've thought about this a bit and I'd add a higher priority.

0. (if female) Be young/beautiful

I don't usually think about this as a guy, but it's a very high priority for women, far above money and even virtue signalling.

Ben points out that optimizing for money is a classic "subgoal stomp"

https://twitter.com/bengoertzel/status/1363009978311741443

But almost nobody ever gets enough money to have to think about that.

Yes, if you get to $5M+ then you need to think less about money and basically ignore this advice.

But for the vast majority of people, it's the opposite. They're trying to do Joy or empathy or some other BS when they should just be aiming to increase their net worth to $1M as a top priority.