On the Difficulty of Reality

One finds that, as one gets older, one's view of the world becomes such that one realizes what they can't do, compared to a younger stage in one's life, in which one might simply focus on what one wants to do. As a child, the can do and can't do dichotomy doesn't exist, one simply finds something they enjoy and, declaratively, wants to be that when they are older. It is only when one gets older that one realizes that such desires, even if they have changed, are likely impossible, and what one wants to do is replaced simply with what one can do, or has to do, particularly vis-à-vis money. Of course, this is an altogether disparaging and depressing realization, so one searches to fill the time in which they are not doing what they have to do - but likely don't want to do - with something they want to do, or, even more depressingly, what society has instructed them to want to do. Which then leaves us with the question that if what one wants to do is impossible, and what one ends up doing is both A) Something they do not want to do, and B) Something society instructs them to do, is the self really a tangible experience, or are we all merely machinations of a larger and more cruel design?