It takes a while to understand the most important things in life. Once you understand, the goal is to create your life around those things, or people.

I am 39 at the time of writing this and over the course of my life I have looked at life in multiple different ways. I have tried to assess the varying importance and weightage of things that matter in our lives, and their relationship with everything else.

In order to answer the question on the headline, we will look at some of the most important things about human existence and then by the end of the post, we will look at answering what matters the most.

Let us get into it. The below are the most important things in life.

1. Family

You are born into a family and they exert a considerable influence over you and the amount of happiness you feel. Your family decides the kind of education, initial set of beliefs and the kind of social circle you get to have. That’s important in the beginning. However, your family continues to be an important part of your life and the source or the lack of happiness in your life.

Either you have a happy family or you don’t.

Families are also of two kinds.

A. The family you are born in

This is the family that creates you. It includes your mother, father, siblings. Whether this family is a happy family or not, has a significant bearing on your entire life and there isn’t much you can do about it. Either your parents love each other, or they don’t. If they do, you have a joyful upbringing. If they don’t, you have a painful upbringing and it continues to affect you for the rest of your life.

B. The family you create

The second kind of family that you encounter is the family you create, if you get married. This definitely includes your spouse, and kids if you choose to have. Now, this family is an extremely important source of your happiness/pain, and therefore, one of the most important things in your life.

Collectively, between these two kinds of families, family as an institution is one of the most important things in your life. If you have a family that makes you strong, you will be able to face a lot of life’s crisis. If you have a family that takes away your strength and makes you weaker, you will find yourself alone in spite of having a family, which is unfortunately worse than not having a family.

2. Work

Work is what you do for a living. Most people spend 40-50 hours a week working. Elon Musk spends way more and perhaps that’s why he is Elon Musk. I will continue to mention Elon Musk across this blog because he is Elon Musk. Now, your work is an extremely important part of your life.

Work does a lot of things for your life:

1. It allows you to pay the bills
2. It gives meaning to your life
3. It allows you to have a professional circle or colleagues
4. It allows you to spend your time constructively rather than idling it around
5. It builds your personality and self-respect

There would be many more things that work does to your life and that is why it is so important to find and do work that you find meaningful. If you do work that you don’t respect, for example, selling cigarettes when you hate smoking and smokers, it would be quite meaningless to take up that job.

Work allows you to pay the bills and that’s important for life. You are going to build a family as you grow and if you can’t afford to pay the bills, you can’t grow a family. More importantly, your family won’t quite respect you if you are not able to find work and use your time constructively. Your friends wouldn’t know what to do around you, because you won’t be able to talk about work.

Therefore, work is an important ‘thing’ in your life.

3. Friends

Friends are an important ‘thing’ in your life. However, as you grow, you will learn that there is a difference between friendships and family. The line differs from one person to another. However, there is a difference. There is only so much you can share with your friends, and in difficult times, you find yourself leaning more on family than friends, unless you happen to be the exception. Most people are closer to their families than to their friends.

Friends are an important part of life because we share our lives with them, our joys and sometimes, our pains.

These are the 3 areas where people spend most of their lives. Either they are at work, or with their family or with friends. They are all important ‘things’ in your life. Obviously, there is health that precedes all of that but it doesn’t take as much time. Secondly, few will debate about the importance of health in our lives. Health is a pre-requisite to live life.

Now, let us look at our list again.

We said family, work and friends are the 3 most important things in your life. Out of these if we were to make a hierarchy, what would that be?

The single most important part of your life is your work because everything else depends on it. Your entire life including family life and social life depends on your work. If you have a successful work life, you are able to pay your bills and you are able to enjoy your work.

If you are able to pay your bills without enjoying your work, which is what majority of the world does, you will be able to survive without enjoying life.

However, if you are not able to find constructive work for yourself, which is the case for the world’s unemployed population, they won’t be able to find any enjoyment in family life or social life, if they happen to have any, which is unlikely.

Our self-respect, our ability to live life comes from working and therefore, work is the single most important part of human life.

The second most important part of your life is family.

A few people may argue that you would not be able to find any work without your family. That’s fine, but that’s not how the world works. People have kids because they want them and they want to give them a good life. However, there is only so much control your parents and your family have over your work life. They can’t do much about it.

Work life is largely individual driven. Once you finish your education and become an adult, you are left free to find your path in the world. Unfortunately, in some cases, family does create problems in choosing the kind of work people do, which is a terrible way of raising kids. In most cases, you need to find your work on your own.

The purpose of the institution of family is love and care. A family is either a strong fighting unit or a loose one. People who come from loving a caring families would tend to do well in life than from families where chaos is the rule. Obviously, the rule may have exceptions but that’s the rule. If you come from a family which constantly loves and supports each other, you will not feel alone on the road of life because you know someone has got your back.

Besides your parents, your life partner is the single most important person in your life. If they understand you and care for you, which is of course a reciprocal relationship, then you will be able to go through the roughs of life quite strongly.

More important, families are about love, and love is the source of happiness in our lives.

The third most important thing in your life are your friends

Now, we live in a shallow society. It is great to have 2-3 great friends than 25 shallow friends. A lot of people have thousands of people in their Facebook friend lists but hardly anyone to call when they need to speak to someone.

It helps to have close friends you can share your life with, in times of joy and in times of pain. Again, they should be people who like you and understand you. However, family and work would routinely take precedence over friends.

Yeah, so this is it. That’s the hierarchy of life.

Your work is the important part or thing in your life. Everything else revolves around that. Work hard. Do work that you find worthy and valuable. Your family would appreciate you for it and so would your friends. So would you.

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani

If you found this post valuable, you may also like to read the one below:

http://amarvani.blog/2020/10/13/how-to-create-depth-in-life/