The goal isn't to strike it rich with your life insurance policy but with your investment vehicles.
Exactly, the point of a life insurance is to hedge the chances of you "DYING" so that your dependents are not left with debt or other expenses. It was never meant to be an investment strategy for retirement. But now these companies are bundling up life insurance to be retirement investments when they really aren't, to make more money.
Here is an example of how poor a whole life insurance is as an investment. Below is the average rate of return on wholelife insurance from New York Life' annual rate of return.
5 years is -10.7% (Because you are paying the sales people and the company for the first couple of years)
10 years is 2.0%
15 years is 3.7%
20 years is 4.6%
Keep in mind that healthy inflation grows at about 3.0%, so after 20 YEARS, you are left with an annualized return of 1.6%. Are you freaking kidding me? You can get an average annualize amount of 8.0% with the S&P500.