There was once something beautiful about becoming. Becoming suggested that a person did not have to arrive fully formed. A young woman could still be discovering her voice, a man could still be learning responsibility, and an adult could acknowledge that there were parts of life he or she had not yet figured out. Becoming allowed room for uncertainty, mistakes, reinvention, education, maturity, and transformation. In an age increasingly obsessed with presentation, however, the unfinished person can feel uncomfortable. We are often encouraged to present ourselves as though we have already arrived.

Social media has intensified this pressure. Platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other digital environments allow people to construct highly selective representations of their lives. What appears to be an ordinary day may actually be carefully photographed, edited, filtered, captioned, and strategically presented. Research on social media has documented associations between appearance-focused social-media use and body-image concerns, particularly when individuals engage in social comparison (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016). The result can be a culture in which people compare their ordinary lives with other people’s carefully constructed highlights.

The problem is not technology itself. Social media can connect families, provide education, create businesses, amplify marginalized voices, and give talented people opportunities that traditional institutions once denied them. The difficulty arises when the medium becomes a stage upon which individuals feel obligated to perform a completed version of themselves. Instead of asking, “Who am I becoming?” people may become preoccupied with “How do I look to everyone else?” The first question encourages development; the second can encourage performance.

The art of becoming requires patience. Patience is difficult in a culture organized around immediacy. Information arrives instantly, entertainment is available on demand, purchases can be delivered rapidly, and public recognition can appear to happen overnight. These conveniences have changed expectations about time. Personal development, however, remains stubbornly slow. Emotional maturity cannot be downloaded. Wisdom cannot be ordered. Character cannot be delivered overnight. A meaningful life continues to require repetition, failure, reflection, discipline, and time.

Developmental psychology has long recognized that human development does not end with childhood. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development proposed that individuals encounter different developmental tasks throughout the life course, including identity formation, intimacy, generativity, and later-life reflection (Erikson, 1963). Although contemporary developmental science has expanded and revised many aspects of Erikson’s original framework, the broader insight remains valuable: human beings continue developing throughout their lives. There is no particular birthday at which a person suddenly becomes a finished product.

Yet contemporary culture frequently encourages people to treat age as a deadline. By twenty-five, one is supposedly supposed to have a career. By thirty, marriage or homeownership may be presented as evidence of success. By forty, a person is expected to have accumulated financial security and professional authority. These expectations are not universal truths. They are cultural scripts. People experience education, relationships, parenthood, careers, illness, financial circumstances, grief, migration, and opportunity at radically different times. A person’s timeline cannot be reduced to a standardized schedule.

The pressure to appear successful can also make ordinary struggle invisible. Someone may post photographs of a vacation without revealing the financial anxiety surrounding the trip. Someone may announce a promotion without discussing years of uncertainty beforehand. Another person may display a beautiful relationship while privately navigating serious difficulties. Social media does not necessarily show deception; rather, it shows selection. People generally choose what they want others to see. The viewer must therefore remember that an image is evidence of a moment, not necessarily evidence of an entire life.

This distinction matters because comparison can distort self-perception. Social-comparison theory, associated particularly with Leon Festinger, proposes that people evaluate themselves partly by comparing themselves with others (Festinger, 1954). Digital platforms provide extraordinary numbers of comparison targets. Instead of comparing ourselves with a small community, we can compare ourselves with thousands of strangers every day. Their careers, homes, bodies, relationships, vacations, possessions, and accomplishments can become measuring sticks against which we evaluate our own progress.

There is another consequence: people can begin documenting life before they have experienced it. A beautiful meal becomes a photograph. A vacation becomes content. A birthday becomes a production. A relationship may become a public narrative. Even personal transformation can become something to announce rather than something to live. Documentation is not inherently problematic, but when every experience becomes material for an audience, the audience can gradually become part of the experience itself.

The art of becoming asks for something different: presence. It asks a person to experience certain moments without immediately converting them into public evidence. Some accomplishments can remain private. Some lessons can be learned without announcing them. Some dreams can remain unfinished without embarrassment. There is tremendous freedom in recognizing that not every stage of life requires an audience.

This is particularly important for young people. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are periods in which identity continues to develop. Research on emerging adulthood describes the late teens and twenties as a period characterized by identity exploration, instability, and possibilities in many contemporary societies (Arnett, 2000). Expecting young adults to possess the certainty of much older adults can therefore create unnecessary pressure. A person who is twenty-two does not necessarily need a ten-year plan. Sometimes twenty-two is precisely the age at which a person should be discovering what kind of life makes sense to them.

Adults, however, also deserve permission to become. Society sometimes assumes that once people reach a certain age, they should already understand themselves completely. But people change. A woman who spent twenty years raising children may discover new interests after her children leave home. A man who worked in one profession for decades may realize that another vocation better reflects his abilities. Someone who once believed marriage was essential may change that belief. Another person may discover spirituality later in life. Reinvention is not necessarily evidence that the earlier version of the person was fraudulent. It can be evidence of development.

The language of “reinvention” itself sometimes creates unnecessary pressure, however. Not every season requires a dramatic transformation. Becoming can be quiet. It can mean learning to communicate better, becoming financially responsible, reading more, becoming kinder, setting healthier boundaries, strengthening one’s faith, developing professional skills, or finally accepting something about oneself. Growth does not always photograph well. Some of the most important transformations occur internally and may never become visible to an audience.

Failure also belongs within the art of becoming. Modern success culture frequently celebrates the finished achievement while minimizing the failed attempts that preceded it. Yet failure can provide information that success sometimes cannot. A rejected application can reveal a missing skill. A failed business can expose an unsustainable strategy. A broken relationship can reveal patterns requiring reflection. None of these experiences automatically produces wisdom, but reflection upon experience can transform difficulty into knowledge. Becoming therefore requires the courage to remain teachable.

There is also a difference between becoming and endlessly optimizing oneself. Contemporary wellness and productivity cultures can sometimes suggest that a person must constantly improve: wake earlier, exercise more, earn more, read more, meditate more, network more, and accomplish more. Self-development can become another form of performance. A person may begin treating the self as a perpetual project that is never allowed to rest. Genuine growth should not require perpetual dissatisfaction with one’s present existence.

Rest is part of becoming too. Human beings are not machines designed solely for productivity. Psychological research on recovery and well-being has emphasized the importance of opportunities to detach from work and replenish psychological resources (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). Rest does not mean abandoning ambition. It means recognizing that sustainable development requires periods in which the individual is not producing, proving, competing, or performing.

The art of becoming also requires relationships that allow people to be unfinished. Genuine friendship should provide space for people to evolve without being permanently imprisoned by their past. Families, too, can struggle when they continue treating adults according to identities established decades earlier. The child who becomes a parent, the rebellious teenager who becomes responsible, or the uncertain young adult who becomes accomplished may still encounter people who insist on remembering an earlier version. Growth sometimes requires not only changing oneself but allowing others to recognize the change.

There is dignity in being a work in progress. That phrase should not be interpreted as an excuse to avoid responsibility. People remain accountable for their choices, and growth does not erase the consequences of harmful behavior. Rather, being a work in progress means acknowledging that accountability and development can coexist. A person can say, “I was wrong,” and then learn. Someone can recognize an unhealthy pattern and work to change it. Someone can admit that they do not know something and pursue knowledge. Humility is one of the foundations of becoming.

Perhaps one of the greatest casualties of the performance culture is curiosity. Curiosity requires admitting that there is something one does not yet know. But the pressure to appear knowledgeable can make uncertainty feel embarrassing. The person who is constantly performing expertise may stop asking questions. By contrast, the person committed to becoming can remain intellectually curious. They can read books outside their field, listen to people with different experiences, study history, learn a language, develop a craft, explore spirituality, or simply change their mind when evidence warrants it.

There is therefore something profoundly human about refusing to be finished. The unfinished person remains open to discovery. She may become wiser than she was five years ago. He may become gentler after experiencing hardship. Someone who once feared change may eventually embrace it. Someone who once defined success through possessions may redefine it through relationships, purpose, service, or peace. Becoming does not mean abandoning who we were; sometimes it means understanding ourselves more deeply because of who we have been.

Perhaps the art of becoming has not disappeared completely. Perhaps it has simply become quieter than the culture of performance surrounding it. It exists in people who study after work, begin again after failure, apologize and change, learn new skills, care for aging parents, raise children, build businesses, return to school, rediscover creativity, strengthen their faith, or simply wake up each morning determined to live differently than they did yesterday. Their transformations may never become viral content. They do not need to. Some of the most important chapters of a person’s life happen before anyone else knows the story has begun.

The challenge, then, is to recover the beauty of becoming. We do not have to arrive fully formed. We do not have to transform every experience into content. We do not have to measure our lives against someone else’s timeline. We can be ambitious without being performative, successful without being consumed by appearances, and unfinished without being ashamed. A human life is not a product waiting for its final packaging. It is a continuing process of learning, choosing, experiencing, failing, loving, reflecting, and changing. Perhaps the question is not whether we have finally become everything we hoped to be. Perhaps the more meaningful question is who are we still becoming?

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References

Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.

Fardouly, J., & Vartanian, L. R. (2016). Social media and body image concerns: Current research and future directions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 9, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.005

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204