The person who told you this is exactly on the money. Not trying to knock his genius; however, this fact is obvious to many of us from developing countries. It is likely why many thousands of my countrymen make the arduous trip daily across the Causeway to your country.

I like to think of it as reaching financial "escape velocity." Everyone has pretty much fixed costs - related to food, water, shelter. Then, there are the discretionary items which are needed to keep one sane - no one wants to subsist on white rice with soy sauce and plain water indefinitely. Unless one has sufficient income to cover those fixed costs and those discretionary costs, focusing purely on saving just isn't sustainable. You might try to cut back on the discretionary, but the constant feeling that you're just "living to work" grinds on your psyche, making you feel like splurging even more on luxuries the next time your paycheque comes in just to "heal."

Admittedly, that wasn't an elegant image, but it's only something that I observed more clearly throughout the lockdowns, when I felt like frittering away my money on worthless luxuries purely to distract myself from the fact that I was stuck at home working all the time.