Family first?

I have noticed that even people who clearly spend enormous amounts of time on their work, like Tom Hanks and Steve Jobs, always say: "family is the most important thing in my life". Everybody says that.

It may be true for them. Or it may not, but they really believe it anyway. I think it's a social acceptance necessity for people to say it and believe it though. It's universally believed, and very strongly, that personal relationships are the most important thing in the world and in anybody's life, and that family is the most important one of those. Anybody who acts or says different is seen by most people to be antisocial to a suspicious degree and to have something wrong with them inside.

And yet many of the people who have made great accomplishments up through history didn't even have a family, or children of their own at least. (Including Jesus and Buddha.)

I'm not saying that friends and family are not important, clearly they are very important to anybody's emotional health. I'm just saying that the universal insistence that they must be the the single most important thing to every person in the world is just ideologically narrow-minded and draconian. For people for whom this may not be true, it often makes them feel that something must be wrong with them.