You can get drowned in a lot of information on this, but the fundamental part of the typical advice (not advice in the more official financial sense) is this:

If you are able to save nothing for retirement, you can never retire. You'll never build up any savings.

If you are able to put away literally everything you earn, you already can retire - your expenses are already covered.

In between those is not a linear scale (as it goes from 0 to infinity). As you setup a life where you are able to save more of your income you do two things:

1. You are able to save more and you get to your target figure faster

2. You need to save less because your lifestyle requires less money

Those combine very powerfully. This can be impacted heavily if you earn well when you're younger because as you invest compound interest makes a big difference over time. Investing in boring index funds (I mentally categorise this as a broad bet on capitalism) and continuing until you have about 25-35x your annual expenses (depends on your risk, there's loads on this) is the overall picture.

To save me redoing the maths, assuming 5% return after inflation and 25x your expenses, saving 10% of your income means working for 51 years, 25% of your income means working for 32 years, 50% means 17 years, and 75% just 7 years. [0]

Before I get the usual responses "but I like nice things" - the point is being deliberate about your spending and your goals. I am in a very fortunate position with my income (as many of us techies are on this site) and could spend a lot more. I would get significantly diminishing returns for spending more however, and it would come at a cost of working more and spending less time with my loved ones.

"ah but you can die any time why live a life of cold beans from the can" - the idea that I can die earlier strongly suggests to me I want to be in a position where I don't need my job earlier - to have more time retired rather than dying at my desk. Also the point is to build a life around things I actually value, not avoiding spending altogether.

"I like my job" - great! Unless you'd work for free, there is something else you'd rather do. Before you're FI you also gain huge security. FI is just "I could walk away from this job and be fine forever" but before then you hit "I would be fine for a month" then a year, then 10 years, 20, etc. Having a decade of runway makes shaky job markets significantly less scary.

Build the life you want to live, and save for it. Spend deliberately on things that you value. If that's cars, find the best way of spending your money to have the most fun with them (a cheaper daily driver and regular track days might be more fun and cheaper than a car a few models up).

I'd check out the subreddits and the sidebars for the standard advice in the personalfinance and financial independence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

The UK specific one has the almighty flowchart https://ukpersonal.finance/flowchart/

The FI subreddit has good advice https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ again check the sidebar for the must reads and key things there. Lots of the advice, particularly for someone your age, should be very generic.

[0] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...