I'd like to apologize in advance (writing this after I saw this wall) for this looong essay.
If I had to point to two things it'd be laziness and or jealousy and envy. Typically lazy people look at what others have and get jealous. It's easy to say someone didn't earn what they've accumulated. But we're not living those other people's lives. We don't for the most part know where they're coming from or how hard it is they actually work. For most problems the starting point is usually the person with them.
In debt, don't spend money you don't have. Don't buy things you can't afford.
Struggling financially with kids, don't have kids you can't afford. Sounds cold blooded, but if you're barley able to feed yourself a kid isn't going to make things easier.
Bottomline is it's much easier to work on ones own problems than go out and try to take on the problems of the world. People have to begin helping themselves and not waiting around for someone else to come make things better. That's why I never jived with church (no offense to church folks), but I never got behind putting my problems into or onto something/someone else. It always seemed like the ultimate cop out "BLANK will take care of it." My first stop when looking at individual. Even in groups, if the individuals that make up a group start making positive changes in their personal lives, then from the outside we'd see the group do well. Plenty of examples of people society loves to highlight who've overcome their obstacles. Usually they all give the same advice and it always boils down to people taking control of their own fates.
Now all that is not to discount issues actually caused by other people. But I think the biggest challenges start with people getting themselves in trouble and their mindset says it must be someone else's fault. Mathematically if the individual is the common theme in all the problems then at some point I have to look at them as a the cause as well. I know it sounds mean, but we can't be afraid to tell people to act in their own interest. That's the wall I usually run into. It's interesting how many people get angry when they go on about whatever is going on. It's the ego defending itself, because no one wants to accept blame. Doing that means they'd have to take responsibility for some of their short comings. I've gotten into heated arguments telling people that no one has more influence over their lives than they do. That's usually where things go downhill. I literally get into arguments because I suggested that they have control over their own lives.
That's how I look at things sometimes. It depends on the topic obviously because there are things genuinely out of people's control.
To break all that text down to its simplest. People need to get out of their own way a lot of the time. Self sabotage is real, there are times when people are their own worst enemy. I think a possible solution would be to help more people realize that they themselves contribute to their own misfortune.
Get their ego in check is what I assume a lot of you would sum it up as. The easiest thing to change or get under control in any problem is yourself. That's why in any stressful situation the first thing someone says is to calm down or remain calm. The first obstacle is the individual because under stress or just being reactionary makes everything worse. So you have to get right if you aren't.