Most people won't do hard things if they don't have to. Everybody would be fit and FIRE if there were an easy way.
There is no substitute for discipline and hard work sustained over time. There are all kinds of motivational quotes out there... the idea is to be one of the people that makes all the changes and does all the hard work and really lives those things.
I would argue that in the case of FIRE you can swap automation for discipline. I certainly don't do any kind of hard work, and am not disciplined at all.
You may think you're not disciplined. Compared to some people in this community, that might be the case. But, regular people out there are routinely taking out 84 month car loans and "living richly" by putting their vacations on their Citibank credit card. They probably think they are disciplined.
It's an interesting thought. Can a person be disciplined without realizing it? My gut feeling is that being disciplined should require some sort of effort, which I definitely do not do with regards to finances (being automated and all). Even the things I do that involve some work are generally less work than the alternative. Like I do bulk meal prep, but the time spent divided by the number of portions produced is WAY less than thinking and making decisions on a daily basis about what to eat, going to a restaurant or ordering, and running bags of garbage out constantly. I suppose frozen dinners would be somewhat less time, but so revolting that I would need SO MUCH actual discipline to get the thing down.
You've hit the nail on the head here.
People attribute to discipline any habit that would be difficult for the majority of people to engage it. But that doesn't mean it requires discipline.
I don't even like the word discipline and I don't use it in therapy because it carries a lot of moral value, which muddies the meaning, especially when talking mostly about behaviours that benefit the self...so yeah, I just don't use the term.
Instead I differentiate tasks that are habitual vs tasks that require using willpower resources. Now, developing habits does require using willpower resources, but once they're habits, they are usually pretty automatic.
Some people struggle with developing some habits more than others, and there are complex reasons for this. My DH gets up at 4am and exercises every morning, it's just habitual. I could never do that without exhausting every ounce of willpower that I start my days with. I just could not possibly do that sustainably. My neurology/physiology don't allow it.
As for frugality, some of us take to it more naturally than others and adapt to the habits so readily that it takes virtually no willpower to sustain them.
I know that for DH and I, our particular flavours of neurodiversity make us very comfortable with nonconformity, so we lack decades of social programming to conform to social spending patterns endemic in our peers. DH in particular has autism and thinks that the way most people spend is stupid. It takes him exactly ZERO will power/discipline to live in an apartment vs a detached home, for example.
Meanwhile, we have countless neurovanilla friends who would experience profound psychological discomfort and feel like abject failures if they didn't own detached homes. I can't tell you how many friends have stayed in horrific marriages primarily because they would have to downgrade to sharing walls if they divorced. This feels like the ultimate failure.
In fact, I distinctly remember a poster here who had a whole thread about how he felt compelled to give his children a more luxurious life than his parents provided him otherwise he would feel like a failure as a father, even though he was less wealthy than his parents and deeply struggled with the conflict between being a good father and being financially responsible. The main struggle of the thread was how to afford to provide a larger home for his children than he grew up in.
For DH, it's not discipline that makes him willing to live in an apartment, take public transit, not drink alcohol, and eat legume-based meals every day To him, that feels like a perfectly reasonable and enjoyable way to live. For many of his peers, that would feel like extreme sacrifice, and require extraordinary amounts of willpower.
We're both from Canadian immigrants families, DH grew up poor Irish Catholic, I grew up poor Danish, and we're both neurodivergent. Growing up poor can sometimes trigger a string desire to save or a string desire to display wealth. The interplay of factors is important here. What takes willpower for us is just very different from what takes willpower for other people, and being frugal is just not something that takes willpower for us. So no, we're not frugal because we're "disciplined."
Just like DH isn't physically active because he's disciplined, he's physically active because he not only has autism, but also ADHD and he's unmedicated, and one of his symptoms is a compulsion to move A LOT, so it takes virtually no willpower for him to exercise a few hours a day.
There are very complex bio/psycho/social factors behind why certain people find certain tasks easier than others. As a society, we like to label certain people as "disciplined," when really, those are actually the people who engage in these behaviours more naturally and with
less effort.
I am often described as the most disciplined, hardest working person people know, which is *hilarious* to me because I am actually the laziest person I've ever encountered. I'm just extraordinarily efficient thanks to the way my brain naturally works, and I get easily addicted to behaviours that society deems "productive."
But good fucking luck trying to get me to do anything I don't want to do. I have phenomenally low willpower resources and will have a pretty quick neurodiverse meltdown if I have to force myself to do them. I'm tremendously skilled at navigating my way through the world and creating spaces for myself where I can just do what I want to do and get rewarded for it. Which is cool. But the more I do that, the less willpower I have and the weaker my discipline becomes.
Those of us who do the "hard" things with ease are often the least disciplined because we don't have to be. But because others have a hard time imagining these things being easy, they assign this character of "being disciplined" to us because they would require enormous willpower to behave the way we do. But everyone would see my lack of willpower if they just put me in a context where I couldn't preferentially do the things that are easy for me.
What we call discipline societally is actually just puritanical nonsense for a combo of predisposition+conditioning.
Actually living a life that requires a lot of sustained willpower to achieve is actually ineffective, inefficient, and a massive waste of resources.
Now, that doesn't mean that people who aren't naturally frugal shouldn't try to be frugal. It just means that instead of starting with willpower and deprivation, they should start with deconstructing some of the conditioning that makes saving money so challenging in the first place.
It doesn't take a ton of therapy to deconstruct narratives around wealth and consumerism. I do it all the time. If being frugal is hard for someone, then the answer is to figure out why it's hard, not to try and knuckle down and be more "disciplined." The goal shouldn't be to get tougher and be more able to handle the pain for doing the hard thing, it should be to make some mental and logistical shifts that make the hard thing feel easy.
[Edited to add a bunch of clarifying info, and better flow of ideas]
