I like the idea of math as "self help." People don't realize it, but the more math you learn, the easier/simpler life becomes... In other words, people learn math not because they like complexity, but because they are lazy and don't want complexity in their life.
For a specific example, consider some complicated arithmetic expression involving a dozen numbers and repeated operations +/-/*/÷. A person who knows high school algebra, could introduce some structure in the expression (e.g. by defining variables), then use the rules of algebra to simplify the expression, and end up doing much arithmetic overall to compute the answer.
The more (as in abstraction and modelling) math you know, the less math (as in arithmetic) you'll have to do!
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