Understood, but if people are spending more money, someone is either working or making more money.
I'm not very good with analogies/metaphors, but I'll try to give this a shot. It might be easier to focus in your mind on money being just a medium of exchange. A simplified way to think about it ot me would be to view money as a score keeping system that roughly ensures that people get to consume in proportion to the amount of value they create. (There are obviously a lot of exceptions to this; people who get their money through stealing, or scamming, or just convincing the government to give them money, etc; but looked at from 30k feet, that's basically what it does).
At any particular time, there is a certain amount of goods and services available in the world and money is used to determine how much of those goods and services each person could call on, if they wanted to. If the government just gives people money, nothing immediately changes with respect to the amount of goods and services available. If everybody just gets an additional $100, in reality, nobody is "$100 richer" as far as the amount of goods and services they can call on. The amount of goods and services are the same, the number of dollars is greater, so the portion of goods and services that each dollar can buy has gone down.
That's inflation in a nutshell. More money chasing after the same amount of goods and services.
Of course it gets much more complicated when you look beyond that initial instant. There are circumstances where economic activity might be significantly reduced such that people want to hold their money to maintain optionality for the future, and when enough people start doing that, the velocity slows down and people value the money even more, which makes them even more likely to hold on to it, and you end up with a situation where creating more money can help break out of a bad, self-reinforcing cycle with respect to holding money. So even though the money itself doesn't make people richer instantly, it results in more economic activity, some of which will be consumption and some of which will be investment in increasing the future amount of goods and services available. That's generally I think why a lot of economists think a low, predictable level of inflation is good. It greases the wheels so to speak.
Or in what is arguably the current situation, we have a ton of debt financed activity, so if economic activity slows down, even from a real economic shock (i.e., people stop doing stuff b/c of a pandemic), then we can kick off a contractionary cycle just because when debt stops getting paid, some debtors stop being able to spend, and so more debt stops getting paid, etc. Printing money, even if it is essentially "robbing" current holders of cash, ensures that we don't go through a painful adjustment as all the debt goes bad, and even the people "robbed" are still better off than if we went through a significant contraction and had to work through all the bad debt.
Not sure any of that's helpful or if it's too simplified to accurate enough. Bu that's my shot.
