It's you. The biggest obstacle to achieve financial freedom is ourselves. We cannot blame someone if we are not living lifestyle that we want, the only thing that we can only blame is ourselves. That's the truth in this cold world. Financial freedom is possible if we have desires and also plan on how we can become like that.
Dreams are just dreams if we will not work and seek opportunities in this world full of abundance. Our mind is limitless, people who don't grow are not thinking outside of the box. That is the reason why we need to think differently from others. There is knowledge that are not publicly available because some of it has price and that kind of knowledge that we should seeking for us to think outside of the box that can helps us to achieve financial freedom.
Unfortunately you are absolutely right, it is in our own hands on how we are spending the money we earn. There are some fixed costs in life that everybody faces like rent, food, clothing and others. But there is a huge difference in what kind of things we buy, for example there is no need to buy brand names all the time. My grand parents always told me to buy high quality products and don't care about any brand names. We want to buy things that last a long time, because if we only buy cheap products they will likely break down very quickly again and need to be replaced. Working and increasing our salary is one side we need to focus on, but also it's important to keep the expenses in check. Getting rid of any unnecessary expenses helped me a lot to save more money each month to put into my crypto and investment portfolio.