Sadly, if you give most people two choices, the easy wrong choice or the slightly harder correct choice, they will choose the easy wrong choice 99% of the time. Most people don’t look at their lifestyle and finances with the cold logic people on this board do. I wish more people did, but not everyones brain is wired for it.
True, but I think it's a little more nuanced than that.
The truths that underpin most people's financial realities can be utterly terrifying to actually acknowledge. The numbers are kind of ugly when you actually look at them compared to what you might expect.
Most people expect that getting a good education and working hard in a "good" job will comfortably produce more than enough to live a "normal" comfortable middle-class lifestyle without the need to pay too close attention to the details. They perceived their parents, their friends parents, TV parents, etc, to effortlessly maintain this standard through "normal" careers, and they see only extreme options like very early retirement or very fancy lifestyles as requiring any special attention to finances.
Meanwhile, when you look closely, you find that a lot of "normal middle class" lifestyles are only affordable on extremely high incomes, especially if the person wants to be able to manage it without paying close attention. I remember being utterly shocked by how plain "normal" the lifestyle of people making a quarter million was. Meanwhile the guy making 400K lived a life that I would have expected for someone who made ~150K. I vividly recall being shocked at just how much money it took to live just marginally nicer versions of middle class life.
I remember assuming that making 30-40% more than the median should put someone into a very nice lifestyle position...yeah...not so much.
People operate under a collection of "givens" that are often grossly erroneous.
Challenging people's givens is much harder than challenging what choices they've made within their established paradigm.
Altering givens is wildly more uncomfortable than simply choosing a different option.
It's the same with health and lifestyle.
It takes A LOT to change people's paradigms from "I'm young and healthy and won't get sick" to "holy shit! My chances of serious illness are actually pretty fucking high!" I can't tell you how many people I've seen go into total fucking meltdown because they have to have a biopsy of a lump or because someone from their highschool died. I remember saying to my brother "you do realize that the healthier you are, the MORE likely you are to die of cancer, right???". The poor guy is still fucked up over that...
Challenging givens and restructuring paradigms is TREMENDOUSLY uncomfortable and can be downright traumatic.
Some of us respond to trauma very productively, some of us just retreat further into denial.
To those of us with paradigms predicated on realistic financial givens, how to spend and how not to spend is obvious. It makes it seem like those who spend irresponsibly are idiotic. Meanwhile, they are literally in denial about what the basis of their own financial reality is and the actual numbers are to be avoided because they risk toppling their entire paradigm if they look too closely at them.
Besides, saving is not the "slightly harder" choice. Working longer in high stress jobs with less flexibility due to unremitting financial stress is the MUCH harder option, they just literally don't accurately see the trade offs that they are making.