The meaning of life through real estate

I used to think HK (and Asia) in general put too much focus on real estate property.

But after reading 30+ annual reports in a couple weeks... I realize the wealth actually has to end up somewhere.

Either the companies return the money to investors as dividends -- but there are reasons to retain the profits, either as expectation management or retaining monies for future operations -- and in fact it's natural that the management wants to grow the company instead of maintaining a boring operation for life.

Alternatively, the companies invest in some stuff.

32 (Cross Harbour Holdings) actually randomly fling their money in private funds and screwed up royally in recent years ("Multicoin Capital Offshore"?? LOL), so I guess that's unwise.

But what else? People need to hold onto something, and eventually that ends up being real estate.

In a sense this is the natural state of things, when daily necessities are cheap due to economic prosperity and abundance, the only thing that doesn't have elastic(?) supply is land. The situation in the US is a bit different, where the economy is relatively more fueled by debt and consumption.

In this sense, in times of economic prosperity, the inflation of our currency is truly only just correlated to property prices. The only way around this isn't really to do anything about the property market per-se (that helps though), but to encourage "wasteful" spending and encouraging people to buy up other expensive stuff (or, worse, buy crap and throw them away), instead of buying properties. The efficiency the economy has to be offset by inefficiencies of consumption, otherwise all costs tend to zero and only things with inelastic supply remains expensive.

What are better ways to "store wealth"? Ultimately money, stocks, bonds, etc. are all tokens of ownership of some "real life" (not necessarily tangible) stuff since they don't have value themselves. In societies of non-wasteful spending, this ends up being real estate.