Very normal to have more expenses in a month than you have in income. And if you don’t have savings (because you’re already living on the razor’s edge) then you need to assume debt.

You can definitely argue all sorts of mistakes people make in financializing that debt rather than eating it in other ways (lower quality of life, deferred maintenance, gig work as secondary income). But you’ll need to ignore the core reality of personal income being divorced from cost of living. Rents, utilities, car/education debt, and health care costs are consistently the highest budget items on any given person’s balance sheet. And so long as those costs continue to outgrow wages, you’re going to see more and more people falling into the debt trap over time.

There is no individual solution to a systemic problem, save escaping the system entirely. “I know a guy who fucked up…” anecdotes are - in my experience - far more often stories about kids from rich families who can absorb the debt or skate it using bankruptcy. The “I know a guy who played a perfect hand and is still totally fucked…” anecdotes are far less common to hear about but far more common in practice.