Survival is a vital part of practical life, as there would be no daily life without surviving in order to experience it, and thus some actions are taken by the average person on a regular basis to ensure this. Even in modern times, the Western approach to careers is about sheer survival before it is about status, comfort, and luxury. Without any of the latter things, people would still need to work simply to have some sort of income to buy food and ensure access to water, housing, and transportation. However, not only is even professional work itself not solely about survival, even if some people only care about getting paid, but numerous other parts of human life are based on things other than survival.
Most social relationships are not ultimately about staying alive. Indeed, in an ultimate sense, social bonds are not necessary for survival at all anyway, as individual people could eat, create shelter, and even live without the constant threat of death on their own, short of having some disability that gets in the way. Increased chances of survival are a byproduct of some social activities, but that is hardly why many people form friendships, seek dating relationships, or gather with others for religious purposes. Survival might rarely even be on the minds of people who are not in immediate danger or severe poverty. Regardless, survival is neither the most foundational thing about reality nor the most important philosophical issue; in fact, it is very far from being either.
It is true that a person cannot grasp reason, introspect, or pursue any personal or moral goal if they are not alive, but there is so much more to the matter that reveals just how trivial survival truly is. Survival could not be understood conceptually or be a part of reality on any level if it was not logically possible to reason out truths about it or to act on those logical truths. Reason is inevitably, inherently more foundational than survival. In the case of survival, that it is a prerequisite to having a life long enough to be able to reflect on key philosophical issues does not make it of anything remotely similar to the utmost importance.
There is more that could be said. For example, there is the fact that understanding one's own existence as a metaphysical being capable of aligning with reason and engaging in introspection is completely different from focusing on the biological nature of the body one's consciousness inhabits or the factors that allow the body to survive. There is the fact that it is not obvious or clear whether or not an afterlife exists, which means that biological survival is not necessarily the ultimate form of human existence as it is. There is the fact that perhaps no one at all wants to survive merely for the sake of living: they seek some sort of ideological or subjective fulfillment and survival happens to keep them on the path to obtaining that fulfillment.
It is hopelessly reductionistic and false to treat survival as the umbrella under which all aspects of human behavior and thought fall. Survival is a means to an end desired more than survival itself, not the sole or ultimate thing for which everyone strives from one moment to the next. Only irrational beliefs would bring someone to pretend like anything contrary to this summarizes human life. This is the very nature of all reductionism, which entails a neglect of all but a single aspect of a concept when that aspect cannot account for the whole. In the case of pitiful reductionistic attempts to emphasize the pursuit of survival over all other parts of human existence, all it takes is a few moments of sincere reflection and introspection to disprove the error in full.
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