Am I designing buildings for people or just for budgets and egos?

You are caught between what a building could be and what the budget and the client's pride will allow. You entered this work to shape spaces that help people live well, and too often you find yourself serving a spreadsheet or someone's vanity instead. That gap hurts because you still remember why you started. The pain is proof your ideals are alive. Here is the honest middle ground. You rarely get to build a pure vision. Constraints are part of the craft, not a betrayal of it. The question is not whether you can escape the budget and the ego. It is whether, inside those limits, you fight for the human good wherever you still can, in the placement of light, the flow of a room, the small dignities that cost little but matter for decades. So choose one thing in the current project to defend for the people who will actually live in it. Not everything, just one thing you will not trade away. Win that, quietly, within the constraints. You are not selling out by working within limits. You would only be selling out if you stopped fighting for the human good at all, and clearly you have not.