What matters to you in life? is a poor question, because it invites defensive nonsense. Everybody has a prepared answer, and everybody's prepared answer is roughly the same, and none of them predict anything.
There is a more mischievous and far more effective version: what is not important to you in life?
Four points on why.
One. Priorities are a critical element, and without unimportant things there are no priorities.
A list on which everything is important is not a list of priorities. It is an inventory, and it will not help you at the moment a choice is actually required, which is the only moment priorities exist for.
Two. Consciously giving up on the less important frees resources for the more important.
Resources here means the real ones — hours, attention, money, and the finite amount of caring a person has available in a week. Those are being spent already, on everything, in undeclared proportions.
Three. Defining what is unimportant exposes your real values.
Because it costs something to say. Anybody can announce that family matters to them. Saying out loud that your career progression does not matter very much, or that you have stopped caring what your extended family thinks, is a claim with consequences — which is precisely why it is informative and the other kind is not.
Four. Frequently, today's unimportant thing was yesterday's important one. And that is all right.
People find that harder than it should be, because they read the change as evidence of having been shallow before. It is not. It is what a person developing looks like from the inside, and the alternative — holding the same list at forty-five that you held at twenty-two — is not integrity. It is simply not having looked.