We live in an economy of capitalism where we expect the economy to continue to expand. It's just a principal of the way we live that we cannot just hang on to our money or we'll lose it. We can't be sitting on our assets. We have to put them to use. That makes sense to us, but it didn't make sense in the first century.
Capitalism is a very recent innovation.
Adam Smith, who got all this started with his book The Wealth of Nations , was buried in the churchyard cemetery at the foot of the long hill in the old part of Edinburgh, Scotland, less than three hundred years ago. In the ancient world, there were so many wars, invasions, defeats, and collapses of economy that the common wisdom was to hang on to your money. If you could hand on to the next generation as much money as you had, that was pretty good. I would remind you that at the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe sank into a thousand-year depression. It was ten centuries before the standard of living for the average person recovered to the point it had been under Roman rule.