However, when asking a few people, it turns out that the problem is very different. Most of them say: "I am not better at enduring than others, I just let my mind do meaningless things.
People really like to tell each other about will, because will sounds heroic. It creates the feeling that if you haven't lived well, the problem is that you are not strong enough. But most of the repeated troubles in life do not stem from our weakness, but from the fact that we keep forcing ourselves to make decisions from the beginning for things that shouldn't need to be thought about so much.
The problem for many people is not spending too much money, but spending too much attention. They go to the supermarket or e-commerce platform with the feeling of buying an item, but in reality they are entering a minefield of choice, comparison, calculation, regret and self-conviction. The result is not necessarily saving much more, but certainly much more tiring.
That's the funny thing about small decisions. Each individual decision seems harmless, but in total, they suck up your mental energy. By the end of the day, you are no longer exhausted from doing big things, but because you have wasted a lot of brain bandwidth on whether to buy three or five bottles of laundry detergent to be "worth it".
People who are called disciplined usually don't live on steel spirit. They live on cuts. They are lazy to argue with themselves. They don't want to renegotiate with themselves about trivial things every day, so they set a few stupid principles to the point of being effective: Buy one when finished, buy what is missing, don't hoard just because they are afraid of losing a good price.
It sounds boring. But it is that boredom that saves them from hundreds of unnecessary distractions. Adults are not really always full of motivation. They are often people who know how to design their lives so that they don't need to use too much motivation.
We often romanticize freedom as if the more choices you have, the more you live according to your wishes. But the more unfiltered choices you have, the easier it is to become a slave to temporary emotions. Freedom does not lie in standing in front of ten options and struggling to choose the optimal one. Freedom lies in having principles clear enough that eight out of ten trivial things are no longer worth thinking about.
That's also why many people think they lack discipline, while what they really lack is structure. They try to fix life with determination, but determination is limited. It's more like a muscle tightening than a support system. You can hold on for a while, but you can't hold on for a lifetime.
The intelligence of people living frugally is not that they are stricter. The intelligence is that they know their minds are fragile, easily tired, easily seduced, and easily rationalize everything. Instead of blindly believing in bravery, they accept that truth and build a mechanism simple enough so that the weak part in them can also live decently.
That's how you know, what makes a person live stably is not that they have iron will. Usually they are realistic enough to understand that the human brain is inherently lazy, easily tired and extremely good at deceiving themselves. So instead of fighting against it every day, they take advantage of it. And our misconception, calling it discipline, while in fact, it is living wisely.
