A quiet adult life full of people you love isn’t settling. Plenty of people would call it winning.

Ambition gets sold to you in one shape: large, visible, impressive to strangers. Measured that way, steady work and people who show up for your birthday can look like something that went wrong. Measured by how it feels from the inside, it looks like most of what anyone is actually chasing. The word settling usually means somebody else would not have picked it.

Describe, to yourself, the ordinary week you would be glad to have at thirty. Notice how little of it requires being known by people who have never met you.