THERE NEED BE NO AGONIZING

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood--that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone. Acquiring what you needed for a comfortably furnished life, and then to take on a social and public life of entertainment, would keep you from even being bored or idle, and would make you feel at the end of the day that you had done exactly what pleased everybody. There need be no agonizing. 

- Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness