Anyway, what's the point of having a lot of assets if you don't enjoy your life at the end?
Where neighbors used to possibly serve as an extension to your resources (a large ladder, sugar, someone to sign a package for you maybe), these days solutions (often technological) have sprung up to reduce the necessity of working together (rent-a-tool shops/sites, ease of transportation, configurable delivery).
Of course, the negative effects of restricted social networks are being felt now in communities (poor cohesion) and individually (mental health issues)... Tech helps sometimes (connecting people who might feel isolated in their immediate surroundings) and can hurt a lot of the time as well.
Happiness is maximized by social inclusion coupled with a sense of meaning (as in your impact in your social sphere being needed and positive). Being surrounded by people who matter and who want you in their midst. That can be a large, cohese, multi-generation family, or an extensive friend network. Multi-generation families living in tight neighborhoods don't happen anymore, so your next best target is an extensive friend network. I'm sorry, but I sincerely believe your stated goals are plain wrong.
[1] Someone other than your life partner; sharing assets and lifestyle with your life partner is limited and an exhaustible resource -- to use your terms.
I'd understand the argument if 50 year olds should be making more friends. They have assets, they have a stable lifestyle, and maybe it's precisely because they didn't invest in making friends earlier that they don't have anyone to share their assets with.
But I'll double down and say that for 30 year olds there are so many other things they can be doing and the environment for making friends is so harsh, that it's simply not worth it. For most young adults, their social circle is extremely mobile. Everyone gets more responsibilities and other priorities that take their time. Most aren't in a position to take care of others (from a combination of money, time, and responsibility) - the simplest of friend making activities, like inviting someone over for a meal, can be very much out of your reach as a 30 year old.
For myself, I'm collecting assets because I want to build a responsible safety net of protection for your family & future. I'm developing my lifestyle to build a nice environment for my kids to grow up in. Not everyone has those things handed to them, and building up those things are not trivial in the modern world. These goals really are multi-decade goals.
I'll acquiesce that they are not lifetime goals. After they are accomplished, there's still a lot of life to live, and values and priorities can change after the underlying needs that the previous goals are built on are fulfilled.
> you have several multi-decade goals to work towards
Why do you think the goals you listed are worthwhile? Who made these goals and why?
To clarify - the study of systems is not to prove a point of superiority or inferiority or to affirm or deny your value system; it's to observe the features of the system that indicate why things might happen the way they do.
When I say adults shouldn't invest much in friendships, it's not because it's bad for adults to value friendship, but because the investment into friendship yields less results than if they invested it somewhere else.
When talking about systems, it's better to talk about them objectively rather than subjectively, and to consider them from a detached viewpoint. Observation is not the same as association; just because I observe a phenomenon and attempt to write it down doesn't mean I associate with it.
For the goals I stated, I do not have an evaluation about these goals from a worth perspective. I merely point out that those things are the primary long term goals of most adults. There's a lot of others, but those seem to be the most common. I'd be happy to argue why they are, but again, my arguments will come from an objective point of view (the features that going after those goals have that make them so popular) rather than a subjective point of view (what I believe is a worthwhile goal).
It's no wonder that whenever I go back to America or see Americans in my travels I am struck by how utterly shallow and unhappy they seem to be. And the stereotype of the American Smile is already disappearing from people's memories.
Typically, if one of your primary needs is to feel loved, valued, and cared for, family and friends solves that the best way. Assets do not.
However, not everyone's primary need is to feel loved, although there is a certain level of that needed by everyone. Your primary need may be for things to stable, organized, orderly, or for you to accomplish goals you set out for, or to be consistent with your value system whatever you set up.
That being said, I have found the feeling happiness and contentment impossible to obtain without mutual human companionship. That being said, the amount of human companionship needed is probably heavily variable between humans; I'm sure some people are happier with less. I find it difficult to imagine a well adjusted (non serial killer) person who is perfectly happy with none. If your personal needs for companionship have always been met, I understand why you'd be confused as to why people seek it out so much.
I wish I had people I felt I could trust like a friend again though, and also understood+got excited by the nerdy stuff. Everyone has their hustles. Takes time I suppose, a couple people I know could turn to friends. Hacker Dojo 1.0 was awesome, seems like hacker spaces have more general appeal now, can’t imagine parties like that again... but I do still know a handful from that era, 1-2 could be friends. I am connecting with relatives, feeling silly for neglecting them for 20 years.
Anecdotes, hopefully helpful and not too self-focused.
Friends can and do provide very strong returns on investment. They can help with asset accumulation (networking for better jobs; in my case I helped a couple of friends with portfolio management of their retirement plans!).
Friends are part of a lifestyle. My lifestyle includes doing group activities with friends 2 nights a week. The social interaction that happens between rounds of trivia is more important to me than the trivia result themselves.
Friends are part of a family, too. Good friends accept and even enjoy it when your partner/kids come along. Eventually you can enter into babysitting swap systems where one family watches the kids while the other couple goes and does other stuff. Also it's important to model mature friendship patterns for your kids.
So overall, friendship isn't only super important in it's own right, it also overlaps with the three important categories you list in your post.
I'd like to posit that "back in the day", people's lives had reached a max in their 20's after they finished school, got a job (unionized and/or indefinite contract), got married, bought a house, started having kids, etc.
Nowadays, school will take longer because you need it to make a decent living - there's too many low paid jobs. Second, to get married and buy a house and such, you need a decent income. To get that, you either need a high education and live in an area where you can use that, or work multiple jobs and have no time for a social life, or be lucky and get a middle class paying jobs in an affordable area.
So it's not just a personal choice from ambition, like you're suggesting, but it's also that the previous generation had it easier. They had the option to work where they live, to buy a house off of that money, and do it all before their 30's.
They later get two internship offers: one from a no name local place where the internship is data science (which they want), but the other is at Googazon Faceple chasing birds off the property. The student inevitably has a meltdown, because they want the prestige of a big four.
This isn't to say that there is inherently anything wrong with trying to min/max life. You'll have a better time (to a point) when you make more money. But let's not forget that if you're spending 5 years in misery for little gain, that's 5 years you aren't getting back.
You only get one life. Enjoy it.
What I mean is that you don't always have to hit max to be satisfied. Don't get so bogged down in the details that you come up for air after you've hit 50.
My cousin lives in Texas, where I had a glimpse of what it was like back in the day. Her 2000 sqft house cost 200k, and she paid it off on a 50k salary. She lives very well, and has no financial worries; life is a bit boring for her.
If I were to buy the equivalent house in my current city, it would cost 20x as much. And it's not just housing that's skyrocketed, it's every aspect of modern day living.
It's truly a multi-decade goal, and min maxing is important to being able to achieve it.
I'm not a min/maxing person, but I do find value out of min/maxing, especially with local optima.
Min/maxing is a great tool in combination with strong personalized value systems, feelings, and a determined will to make your life your own.
I see no problem with trying to min/max life, unless you're philosophically opposed to the systemic issues that a min/maxing society generates.
So golf by yourself, and a walk around the block in your new suit?
How is making friends not a part of lifestyle development?
Btw kurtzgesagt has a very interesting video[1] on the subject where they show that rats get really anxious if they can't socialize. They then take a leap and say that human are pretty much the same.
I think such a utilitarian view is a post-hoc rationalization rather than a useful way to look at it. But even if we follow this line of thought, it is not clear that family, for example is of such high value that it has to be detrimental to everything else. It seems more to me that family benefited from the time freed up by not having friendly relationships, but whether people derive more value from family than they did in the past is very debateable. Spending more time with it is not proof that it has higher value - people will always do something in lack of alternatives.
Not bitter about it but just stating the fact that lasting friendships aren't the best investment because of how volatile modern society can be.
When you're young (<20), you don't have many responsibilities or long term goals. But as soon as you get out of college, you have several multi-decade goals to work towards:
1) asset accumulation
2) lifestyle development
3) family raising
From a pure risk management point of view, assets, lifstyle, and family are much more stable in terms of extracting value from.
Friends, from a value added point of view, are a risky investment for a couple of reasons. They require time and commitment to make and get value out of, but have a high chance of no return. If you invest too much in friends, you're pretty much guaranteed that something out of your control breaks the friendship by 5-10 years, either moving away, diverging interests, or the most likely, the friend decides to invest time in the assets, lifestyle, and family instead of your friendship.
There's a vicious circle (opposite of virtuous cycle) in this. As a society, if more people focus on family, assets, and lifestyle because they are less risky, there's less people willing to commit to being a friend available for those that want to focus on friendships, and eventually friendship by the age of 30 become extinct except in rare cases where special environments sustain them.
To summarize, it's a systemic issue where even if you wanted to make friends, it's not worth it as an adult to do so.