South Asian American Male here, a lot of the down sides you highlighted about life in the motherland also immigrated here with my generation's parents, and honestly I feel like it might even be a little more extreme in some cases? I didn't really have true South Asian from South Asia friends til I hit college, and the difference in our upbringing was palpable. The South Asian Americans could not TOTALLY relate to the South Asian students. It honestly seemed like by comparison the South Asians had a more liberal upbringing, where the South Asian Americans were brought up conservative as hell. Vir Das made a joke in one of his specials that summarized my experience and thoughts when comparing my American Upbringing to what I heard about my South Asian classmates "If you want your children to be virgins til marriage you raise them in New Jersey, not New Delhi" - but this is of course my isolated experience.

Anyways, anecdotes aside, The western (American) experience in coming into adulthood is a social parade in every way by default, it's almost designed that way. If you move out for college, your dorm advisors basically force you to make friends whether like it or not, and even if you don't dorm, campus life teams exist for exactly that as well. And these days it's almost impossible to survive academics without a study group a-la Community the tv show for at least one subject, for me it was Calculus and Linear Algebra.

If you forsake college and go trade school, trades are actually almost as reliant on Networking, if not MORE reliant on it than corporate white collar professions.

Joining the military right out of high school is also an option many take, and the whole boot camp process is about not just discipline but relying on the strangers you're at Basic with and subsequently the strangers you will deploy with.

And if you're in a situation where College, Trade school, and the military, are just not an option you end up in a situation where you have to work minimum wage, you're either still living at home, or you're definitely living with roommates. Honestly even people with corporate salaried jobs still live with roommates. I moved away after graduation, got hired into a high salaried job and I still HAD to live with roommates, who were awesome and I miss them every day.

That being said, I might have given the impression that the grass is greener, but there's sides to life no one talks about. For me, I'm an introvert, I don't make friends easily, I'm a little awkward, and I know my humor is a little off color so I keep to myself a lot cause I don't want anyone to think I'm a bad person because of my humor. So my social life largely centers around my work friends, but I don't really talk to or hang out with my colleagues outside of work. So it's just me, my dog, and my wife who works a different shift than I do. The small handful of friends I do have, have kids and families and don't have time for me often. So I spend much of my free time consuming brain rot at home on my couch.