"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

—George Eliot, Middlemarch

Self-will can make life feel like a largely private project—something to get right, to manage well, to secure against future difficulty. Other people exist within that framework, but often around the edges. The question Eliot poses gently reorients things. Not what do I live for, but what do we live for.

The answer she implies is not grand. It is not about legacy or impact in any large sense. It is about the ordinary texture of a life shared with others—whether we make things a little easier or a little harder for the people we move through the world alongside. That may be a quieter measure of a life than most of us were taught to use. It may also be more honest.