Survival is the most important matter.
Other things can matter even if they have little or no bearing on survival, but they don’t matter nearly as much, which becomes evident when someone takes your food away, and you begin to starve.
You can be surrounded by all manner of extravagance and luxury, but if you’re starving, you’d gladly sell it all just to get a bit of food.
I mean sure, people commit suicide, but only when they’re completely and utterly hopelessly miserable, in despair, so long as they’re not, and often even if they are, people will go on living.
Usually people commit suicide cause they feel totally isolated from and useless to everyone else’s survival and happiness.
Yes survival is primary, you can’t pursue whatever else makes you happy besides just living if you’re dead, or in imminent danger, and arguably life itself does, or ought to make us happy, just living, especially if you’re healthy, enjoying the simple things like good food or company we take for granted, we don’t need or really even want extravagance and luxury when we examine these things carefully.
I would never significantly risk my life or health for a luxury or an extravagance, or I would only take a really very small risk, would you?
I think if you would there’s something wrong with you, in my view.
But then people do this all the time, whether it’s gangsters and gamblers gambling in casinos or on the stock market risking life and limb or bankruptcy for riches, or food, drug and sex addicts, workaholics, materialist consumerists.
People risk their lives, compromise their health and families for their addictions, but is this not sickness?
To risk and compromise the essential, for the inessential, the ephemeral, frivolous and more fleeting?
A poor assessment of value and importance on their parts?
Is it not what’s responsible for humanities doom: this rat race we’re on, this consumerist hell, leading us down a highway of destruction, erosion of the very environment on which we’re dependent?
I say it is, sickness.