love, esteem and belonging are typically not achieved by coming up with a plan to get them (coming up with a plan to make someone like you is often called manipulative and is widely criticized).

Roko, I'm surprised you didn't see the flaw in this sentence. Trying to make a particular person like you (from scratch) is indeed a bad plan, but that's not the thing one should necessarily attempt to do in the first place, and in fact it's one of the traps people characteristically fall into by not being rational.

One who is trying to optimize "love, esteem and belonging" can do a lot with a bit of rational planning: actively seeking out communities of people with common interests, developing an external hobby that serves to raise one's profile among current acquaintances, training oneself to confront social fears in a different way than before, etc. The failure of most people to do these things (and their tendency to treat their current social circle as their irreplaceable tribe, for instance) do cause real social costs.

I think that most of the meme of "trying to rationally think about social life = social failure" is actually due to the preponderance of autism spectrum people among those trying to apply rational thought to social life; for a given person, treating it more genuinely rationally seems to be a net gain.