One of the most important things in life is to always determine what requires our attention, what’s the most important thing for us, what is that thing that we are going to put before everything and everyone else.

This can change throughout our lives, and it obviously should; while the priority of a toddler on a hot summer day will most likely be his lollipop, for a grown man it may be the well-being of his family. Priorities will change depending on a wide number of factors and hence making a generalization as to what ought to be important in someones life would be somewhat close minded. However, there are some things that we can objectively say ought to be important for a certain person, in a certain situation, at a certain stage of their life. Take for instance a mother that just gave birth. It does not require a degree in philosophy to determine that the safety of her newborn baby should and ought to be the most important thing for her. Let me open another branch in this argument to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying (taking the above example) that the baby WILL be the most important thing for the mother; there are several cases in which mothers could not care less about the newborn, for whatever reason. I am not saying that this is how things are or should be one hundred percent of the time, just what should be objectively right in most cases.

So if you consider that your life has been somewhat normal (very loose term) this argument should appeal to you: friendship is more important than family; if you don’t agree then entertain the thought for a a few minutes.

First is important to consider that this is not the case for everyone as I explained in the beginning that priorities change throughout your life, but if you think about your life and how it unfolds there are a lot of reasons as to why you might want to focus on looking for new, good people to spend the rest of your life with and call them friends, rather than adapt to the family that you were arbitrarily given.

You are born half of a blank slate (given that fifty percent of your traits, physical and psychological may be genetic) and the other half starts getting full from the moment that your environment starts having an impact on you. This includes the socio-economical status in which you were born, your parents morals and values, the school you go to, the teachers you have, the people you meet, and the list is almost endless; and this is just your early ages, but what happens after is the consequence of all this.

Then you are a teenager, you start thinking “freely”, and you do one of two things: you reinforce the beliefs and values that you learned from your family or you go against the beliefs and values that your family holds. What happens in most cases is a combination of the two, where most people hold some of the family values throughout their lives, but also get rid of others; after all, we are not clones of our parents.

Once the teenager years are gone and you start getting closer to your mid 20s, your personality is settling, you are becoming the person you are going to be for the rest of your life. The decisions that you take from that point, and the consequences, are your responsibility, and around that age you are taking important decisions: where you are going to work, your career, and the people that are gonna be with you for the rest of your life, just to name a few.

Your family was there to help you and support you in the early stages of your life, but now you are made as a person, with a free mind, with your own beliefs and values. This is why I think is more important to focus on friendship than family. At this point you are gonna choose the people who are gonna be there with you in the important moments. You don’t have to deal with that extremely conservative aunt with whom you need to fake that you are extremely religious. You don’t have to eat a mint after drinking a beer because your mom has never seen you drunk or high. You don’t have to be forced to have family dinner at the table at 6 PM because that’s what your dad wants. You don’t have to babysit your younger cousin while your aunt and your mom gossip in the kitchen.

You choose your friends and the fact that there are millions of different people with different values and opinions makes it possible to choose them however you want them to be. And if you don’t like them for whatever reason? great, you can get away from them since there is no biological tie to them. We all like to have control in our lives, specially when it comes to deciding who is gonna be close to us in the important moment of our life; nobody would like to be forced to be with someone and have to adapt to how they are in order to be happy (shoutout to some people in the east). When you take into consideration the fact that you can choose who who are you going to share your secrets, fears, good moments and bad moments, is not hard to see that this is much better than being forced to adapt to someone in order to be in their live.