But the satisfaction of our non-social needs in a modern environment depend much much less on other people's strategies. Today, you can obtain all your non-social needs with hardly any social interaction; living alone, working from home, buying groceries from strangers; ignoring news and local trends.
In the past, meeting non-social needs required more social support, and could be thwarted more easily by the whims of others. Think of living in a band or tribe level society!
I agree that certain sorts of planning are more modern, but these new forms seem to require less sophisticated social understanding than old method. Compare: Investing in a retirement fund, and investing in connections with the next generation because you need them to feed you in your old age.
In the past, meeting non-social needs required more social support
I am not sure about that -- subsistence farming is pretty self-sufficient. Individual, separated homesteads were the norm in several cultures/time periods and given how you don't count trading with others as social interaction, someone living with his family on a distant farm (without any telecommunications) probably had much less "social support" than a modern nerd spending his time on the 'net.
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