I feel the bondage of debt, and I don't even have that much. I have student loans, and a very small amount of credit card debt. You hear all the time about people with tens of thousands in credit card debt, car payments up the wazoo, just barely squeaking by in their heavily mortgaged house with every modern convenience known to man.
The problem with all that is not the consumerism, as we're often told. Stuff is not a problem in and of itself. However, the people with the most stuff seem to want to keep it more than anything. And when you don't really own anything, because it all belongs to banks and credit card companies, the possibility of losing the stuff is very, very real. More real than a fire. At least you can buy insurance (another payment) and be okay with a fire destroying all your stuff. But if you can't pay for the stuff, it's going to go away and there's no debt insurance. You will most likely still have to pay for stuff you don't even have anymore.
This is a common occurence with cars. If you buy a new car, it loses a ton of value just by driving it off the lot. If you financed it, and drove it off the lot, and then sold it to pay off the debt, you would not have enough money to pay it all back.
So why do people use debt? Because we want it now. If I finance it, I can get it now. Look, no payments for a year. No interest either. What a deal! But, if you could afford it, you could pay cash.
No-one can afford debt. If you can afford the debt, you can afford to pay cash a little later. The biggest exception is land or a house. It's extremely hard to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can be done though. However, debt is almost okay in this form, because the house will probably be worth enough to pay the debt off in the end.
Debt is not necessary. Debt is not an insurmountable problem. Even the US Government could pay off its debt if it wanted to. But it's very, very hard.