How do I cope when reality never matches my vision?

You hold a vision for a whole city's future, and you watch it get whittled down to compromises by the time anything is actually built. That gulf is exhausting, especially for someone who can still see clearly what could be. The gap between the dream and the concrete wears on the people who care most. But a city was never built by one person's vision landing whole. It is the slow work of many hands, budgets, and arguments, and every builder before you faced the same erosion. The compromise is not the failure of the vision; it is the price of building anything real in a place full of other people. What gets built imperfectly still shapes lives for generations. That is not nothing. So change how you measure the win. Do not weigh what got built against the perfect version in your head — weigh it against what would have been built with no one fighting for the vision at all. Pick one thing in the next project that you will not compromise, and hold that line hard. Bend on the rest. A planner who saves one true thing per project leaves a real mark.