The importance of family and such

When people say something is important to them, what do they mean? Important in what sense? Important by what criteria?

I can think of a few questions to gauge what is important to someone:

If you could only achieve one thing in your life, what would it be?
If you could only spend your life doing one thing, what would it be?
If you could only know one person in your life, who would it be?
How do you want to be remembered?
How do you want to be perceived right now?
Whose respect do you most hope to earn?
Whose admiration do you most hope to earn?
Whose love do you most hope to earn?
What ideas/principles are you willing to die for?
Who are you willing to die for?
What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life?
What is the best way you can spend your time?
What is the best way you spent your time today?
If you knew you had only weeks to live, how would you spend your time?
If you knew you had only hours to live, how would you spend your time?
If you knew you had only minutes to live, how would you spend your time?
Added 11/30: Of all the things in your life, which would you be the most sorry to lose irrevocably?
Added 11/30: What would you most like to gain in your life?

If you’re like me, you have very different answers to these questions. And if you’re like me, because you have such different answers, you have a hard time understanding how anyone could have a rank-ordered list of overall importance.

Rank-ordered lists for books, movies, and such are one thing – I understand that people have the ability to perform some sort of neuro-emotional calculus based on experiences to assemble roughshod “best of” lists – but having a rank-ordered list of what’s “important” seems like a much more mysterious (and questionable) feat.

Which is why I am so intrigued by people’s confidence in their priorities.

BO was interviewed the other night by the hard-hitting Barbara Walters and she asked something like could he ever see a reason why he would not run for a second term. His response was that nothing is more important to him than being the President of the United States … except for his family and his faith.

...Family and Faith. A familiar refrain. The importance of faith across individuals is spotty, but I have yet to hear someone say that their family is not important to them. Not only does family seem to be almost universally important, it seems to be proclaimed as most important with striking regularity. (On a side note, I wonder what proportion of the faithful would say their faith is more important than their family.)

Could it possibly be true that even the President of the United States – someone spending upwards of 80 hours per week toward goals like “healthcare”, “economy”, and “national defense” – places more importance on his own teeny little family than the job with more influence than any other? That almost seems selfish... but at the same time P.C.

Even if it is just political correctness, lots of people without political motivations will say the same thing. I can’t help but wonder how sincere these people are. If your family is #1, how can you justify spending 80 (or even 40) hours a week toward pursuing some goal unrelated to your family? Isn’t what you care most about reflected in how you spend your time, or at least in what goals you choose to pursue?

Family-lovers might respond by saying that although they spend their time in pursuit of career-related goals, their family shares in their career-related success, and their motivation for wanting to be successful is their family.

It seems odd to me that people will go out of their way to signal humility, but they are so unwilling to admit what we might call “unvirtuous” aims or motivations, which is just about anything that’s not family or faith—not just power and greed but just plain personal motivations like fulfillment, pride, or excitement.

The only way I know to test such claims of virtuosity is by returning to the original questions above. It’s possible that someone’s answer to each of these questions could be some variation on “family”. I could easily see a new parent answering “family” (namely, “child”) to just about all the questions, and I could just as easily see a newly-infatuated person answer “love of my life” to just about all the questions. But when not under the drug-like spell of these life events, I imagine most people will be like me and have very different answers.

Which leads me to the (perhaps obvious) conclusion that certain life events can deliver a truly focused sense of “importance” but that most of the time for most people we default to a scattered set of hopes, ambitions, and values.