Claim 1. A method for surviving, comprising: Cooking a meal.
Claim 2. A method as in claim 1, wherein the meal is breakfast.
Claim 3. A method as in claim 2, wherein the breakfast comprises sausages and bacon.
Claim 4. A method as in claim 3, wherein the sausages and bacon are fried.
and so on. A court might decide that there's some prior art for having meals, and toss out claim 1. But that prior art might only be for lunch and dinner, in which case claim 2 might survive. On the other hand, maybe someone else has had breakfast before (publicly enough to count as prior art). Then claim 2 goes too, but maybe claim 3 survives. Oh, too bad, it turns out that the court thinks having sausage and bacon for breakfast is obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. Bye-bye to claim 3, but maybe frying them is an extraordinary new idea that no one else would have thought of.
Of course, similar things can happen during patent prosecution (i.e., filing; the terminology is silly), only now it's the patent office that keeps objecting to your claims and requiring you to fall back to weaker dependent claims.
It's absolutely standard for your first claim to be very broad, and subsequent ones to be narrower. It's absolutely not standard for claim 1 to be "best" in the sense of "least likely to be invalidated".