Angst, the final frontier?

According to a post at io9.com, an actor in the upcoming Star Trek movie says the reason why Kirk joined Star Fleet is because he wanted to get away from the trauma of an abusive uncle.

Yuck.

Why can't Kirk join Star Fleet just because he loves space and wants to be with the thing that he values? By "space" I mean: the universe and the possibilities for exploring it, the stars, the planets, traveling between them, civilizations discovered and undiscovered, etc, etc.

This is why I don't care for J. J. Abrams and don't watch his shows, especially Lost, which strikes me as being just a bunch of fucked-up people treating each other like shit. It's all about showing that human beings are supposedly nothing but monsters and are not capable of doing anything but hurting each other and I don't want to have anything to do with it.

As far as I'm concerned, the real reason why Kirk joined Star Fleet is to be found in the way William Shatner intones the famous words that open every episode of the original Star Trek, beginning with: "Space . . . the final frontier . . . "