When everything around suggests that the system is rigged against you and care against you, it's no surprise that many people live for the moment and try to find some small bit of pleasure or joy in the moment without planning for a future that may not come.
It's easy to say "why don't they save more?" from an upper or middle class stability, but when the price of everything keeps going up, the police are out to get you, and healthcare is just a fast track to debt that will take away any savings or assets you managed to have, what's the point?
This is a bit too romantic imo. From my eyes, it's mostly:
"An old AMG at 20 is better than a new Ferrari at 60."
There's a slider for how well you want to live your early vs late life. If you work hard, you'll be better off later, and if you go crazy early on, you'll be worse off later. However, there is a point in that you can't catch up on 20-year-old sex, getting drunk or drugged up out of your mind or general fun with friends at 60.
I'm not and never have been into drugs, alcohol and clubbing, so I don't know the limit.
The most I've seen was a ~1k EUR monthly budget for drugs by a person I knew whose main hobby was drugs. It's not astronomical, but we were both students in ~300 EUR/month dorms. It also affected his career progress. Lectures at 8 AM don't mix well with coke the night before.
With cars, the sky's the limit. I'm making 6 digits, and I can still ruin myself financially in a weekend.
And it's not just financially. I love motorcycles because they're cheap, but if I have a proper accident, it'd set me back months if not forever.
It would be easier to buy that argument if it wasn't happening in countries where healthcare is not fast track to debt and police is not out there to get you. I come from such a country and a lot of financially struggling people overspent on status symbols all the time.
Sure, because status matters more than finances. Getting rich may be extremely unlikely if not outright impossible. Looking rich to your peers (and "feeling rich") on the other hand may just be a few years worth of small affordable installments away - even if it's completely superficial and short-lived. And entire industries will literally spend your every waking second trying to convince you that buying their product will make you feel rich.
It has nothing to do with credit.
The whole buy-now-pay-later, 0% rates or pay-day loans industry came much later here. The same goes for predatory marketing industry.
When I went to elementary school everyone was poor as it was a year after communism collapsed. People were still spending their last money on shiny things back then even if those shiny things weren't as shiny as they are today.
>>Getting rich may be extremely unlikely if not outright impossible
Again, in communist and then post communist countries no one thought we could be rich. The things we thought about back then was being able to buy enough food and trying to educate ourselves as education was valued in itself in some families.
Even back then a lot of people spent their last money on pointless shiny things.
I feel Americans and some Western Europeans look for ways to justify dumb behavior and come up with all those theories that have nothing to do with human nature. If you grow up in a country where everyone is the same race, everyone is poor (at least for a few years), the police is not out there to get you and healthcare is free even if terrible and you still witness people making the same stupid decisions you realize it has nothing to do with those theories and everything to do with education, values and ability to make sensible decisions.
I think you're half right. But there are cultures in which people save money. (You can just run a web search for "savings rate".)
My hypothesis is that "human" nature does play a role, specifically a very general phenomenon in animal psychology called "observational learning". If you see people around you who saved money and it worked out for them, you're more likely to imitate those people. Saving money probably isn't instinctive for the vast majority, but that doesn't mean it's unattainable.
Taking the contrapositive, if we look at cultures where people don't save money, it's probably because of a lack of successful role models. Saving money hasn't worked out for people in that culture in the past, so there's nobody to imitate. There are always going to be a few people who do save money, but if they get wiped out by medical debt, rampant hyperinflation, or some other systemic crises, or if the country's bankruptcy laws are so generous that their spendthrift counterparts ultimately live better than they do, then their behavior is less likely to catch on.
In the US, savings culture has been decimated by years of QE and ZIRP, so the people who poured all of their money into housing and stocks did better than the cautious types. Skeptics have claimed for years that this will lead to an awful hangover. We'll see.
It has a lot to do with the structure of economies. Usually they're big exporters with fairly stable currencies. The differences in savings rates are super huge, even within cultural groups.
It's easy to say "why don't they save more?" from an upper or middle class stability, but when the price of everything keeps going up, the police are out to get you, and healthcare is just a fast track to debt that will take away any savings or assets you managed to have, what's the point?