There’s a lot of purposeful NPC activity in Skyrim: farming, woodcutting, hunting, mining and so on. What I really like is that we have a depiction of life going on largely regardless of all the heroic events we’re involved in. So while you’re desperately battling a dragon, or speaking with gods, people are carrying on with what matters to them. Your concerns are not their concerns.

It’s most explicit in the dialogue of a farmer’s wife in Rorikstead, who talks about farming being the most noble of activities. And she’s right in a way.

Of course sometimes big events, like dragon attacks, do impinge on people’s lives, but they care because it interferes with their livelihoods, and not otherwise.

This all reminds me of W.H. Auden’s poem, the title of which is the title of this topic. It goes like this:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.