The first barrier is one of imagination.
We’re not told that it’s possible to have an amazing life spending very little. Indeed, we’re taught to assume that “spending” is tightly correlated to “quality of life”. It’s rarely even entertained at all, because we see no one else doing it. We don’t know anyone who is capable of thinking it: people are either wealthy, and trying to get wealthier, or not wealthy, and scraping to get wealthy. “Wealth” is the game that everyone is playing, and it’s easy to not know that there are other games to play.
The first step to a good life is to resolve to play the game you actually want to play, and be fine with losing the games you don’t want to play. Don’t play the game your parents, friends, or significant other thinks you should play (and in facts assumes you are playing, because they don’t know there are other games to play). This is very hard, because if you spend much time with people playing a game that you aren’t playing, you will feel like a loser.
For example, my best friend is into powerlifting, and his wife and all of their friends are also into powerlifting. They all play the powerlifting game. If I were playing the powerlifting game, I’d be very obviously losing hard. I did 15 pushups the other day and was sore for three days. My friend is almost 60 pounds heavier than me and it’s all muscle. When I hang around them, I have to remind myself that I’m not playing that game and am therefore not in fact a loser, but it is difficult. I start thinking that maybe I should eat more steaks and work on my deadlift form (and maybe, like, start deadlifting again).
What makes it tolerable is that everyone knows my friend is playing a game that I’m not. It would be much more difficult to do my own thing if everyone in the world were a powerlifter, and didn’t understand that dedicating oneself to anything besides lifting really heavy weights was even an option. This is what it’s like if you decide to stop playing the wealth game and do something else. Almost no one understands that the wealth game IS a game, and that there are other options.
Our society is now arranged such that wealth is implicitly the only game in town. In fact, our society has quietly converted several other games into the wealth game without the players noticing, which creates an illusion of choice and makes it hard to tell that we’re mostly all only playing the same stupid game. For example, some people used to be into traveling the world, which was about exploration, discovery, novel experiences, and the like. Our society has almost completely converted travel into a method for spending and displaying wealth. Travel is now “consumed” rather than experienced by almost everyone who engages in it. It’s a sub-game of the same overall game.
Education, specifically “higher” education, used to be about, well, education. The purpose of it was to cultivate a higher form of human, intellectual and civilized, well-read and morally refined. University now is about increasing one’s earning (and thus spending) power. The only culturally acceptable reason to skip or drop out of university is if you can demonstrate that you find it unnecessary by generating a lot of money without a degree. No one skips university in order to develop a diy liberal education - they skip it in order to get ahead in the money game even faster.
It is incredibly difficult to escape the hegemonic reach of the wealth game due to its subversion of just about every single activity we consumers are presented with as options. We aren’t even any longer given the identity of citizen! We are assigned the identity of consumer at birth. The message we internalize is that consumption is the game we were born to play.
Let’s pretend for the sake of discussion that there’s nothing inherently wrong with playing the consumption game. Play it if you like! But know that there are other games to play, and consider that that cold clutching desperate feeling you get at the top of your stomach late at night when you’re alone might be your body trying to tell you that you’re supposed to be playing a different game, that you have some different purpose in life to fulfill.
The biggest losers are the people who win at games they don’t actually, deep down, want to play.