From Orson Scott Card:
People make their own quality of life. There are people who are desperately unhappy in the midst of freedom and plenty, and people who are quite cheerful despite devastating deprivation and loss.
My wife was once at a gathering of church women, when one of them started complaining about how desperately hard it was to choose just the right dining room set for her new home. She seemed genuinely distressed. And the other ladies commiserated. But my wife knew that one of the women was suffering through the breakup of her marriage, and another was worried because her husband was probably going to be laid off. Every one of them had problems that made choosing a dining room set almost laughably trivial.
But to that one woman, the dining room problem was the worst thing in her life. It’s as if she had a certain amount of misery she was determined to feel, and settled on whatever came to hand to be miserable about.
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