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How to Build a Small, Satisfying Life in 2025

Too many of us are expecting too much from ourselves. It’s time to sit back and evaluate.

Tessa Schlesinger
5 min readDec 27, 2024
Me — Pacific Beach, San Diego, circa 2008. Own photo.

“You can be anything you want to be,” has been quite a destructive mantra for quite a long time. The simple truth is that very few of us can be what we want to be. We don’t have the DNA, or we don’t have the resources, or we live in the wrong country, or we are encumbered by other circumstances that make it unlikely we will get to be what we want to be.

The downside of that piece of garbage advice is that, eventually, most will realize that they cannot be what they want to be, that success keeps eluding them, and they begin to blame other forces — the opposing political party, the opposite gender, the rich, the poor, the this, and the that. The truth of the matter is that the goal was unrealistic, anyway, and it was never going to happen.

So, depression, and sometimes mental illness results results, and people get burnt out, and they feel miserable all the time. Yet, all is not lost. It’s a matter of understanding reality, of what can be, and adjusting to achieve what can be.

In other generations, they called it cutting one’s coat according to one’s cloth.

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