So:

• What most humans tell you about their goals should be interpreted as public relations material;
• Most humans are victims of memetic hijacking;

To give an example of a survivalist, here's an individual who proposes that we should be highly prioritizing species-level survival:

• The end of humanity: Nick Bostrom at TEDxOxford

As you say, this is not a typical human being - since Nick says he is highly concerned about others.

There are many other survivalists out there, many of whom are much more concerned with personal survival.

Even to the extent that natural selection can be said to be care about anything, saying that survival is that thing is kind of misleading.

Well, I have gone into more details elsewhere.

It's perfectly normal for populations to hill-climb themselves into a local optimum and then get wiped out when it's invalidated by changing environmental conditions that a more basal but less specialized species would have been able to handle, for example.

Sure. Optimization involves going uphill - but you might be climbing a mountain that is sinking into the sea. However, that doesn't mean that you weren't really optimizing - or that you were optimizing something other than altitude.