When I was a young child I wanted to please my parents. I don't recall feeling stressed about it, probably because I felt secure in their care.
As I grew older and went to school, I wanted to please my teachers. Again I felt no stress since pleasing them came easily.
As a teenager, though, life became more complex. I still wanted to please my teachers, but there was more pressure now with the variety of teachers and subjects. And there was a new element: wanting the approval of my schoolmates. Winning that approval was more abstract and demanding, with a pervasive pressure to intuit and conform to unarticulated expectations.
Life seemed much easier when I was out of school and raising a family. I was back to the easier to comprehend task of trying to please authority figures now the boss at work and the wife and children I adored at home. The need to win peer approval was no longer part of the equation for me.
In the background, though, through all the changing circumstances of life a program was running whose purpose was to please itself i.e., to weigh the multifarious fears and desires that bombarded the mind and to react according to the program's dictates. I was that program.