Being vs Becoming

The myth of arrival and the fatigue of becoming

I’ve spent most of my life preparing for my life.

I know it sounds weird but that’s genuinely the best way I can describe it. For what feels like most of my adult life, I’ve existed in a state of transition. I’ve always been the person “on the way” to something. Whether that’s me becoming more disciplined. Becoming more creative. Becoming more successful. Becoming healthier and sharper and more established. Every version of myself has felt…temporary. Almost like a draft of the final version. In my mind, there has always been an imaginary moment ahead of me where everything would just…click. A threshold where all the scattered pieces of my effort would assemble themselves into something solid and stable. That’s when my REAL life would begin. Not before. Everything before that moment, I was just preparing.

The strange thing about this is that I’ve built a lot in that “preparation”. Degrees. Projects. Writing. Systems. Goals. Skills. A body of work. Ambition has not been empty for me. Becoming has been productive. It’s given me direction and structure. It has pushed me through very uncomfortable moments. And I’m not going to pretend like I don’t admire that part of myself. The part that wants more and refuses to stop pushing.

But and there’s always a but.

Becoming runs on the assumption that who I am right now is not enough. I’m not saying I’m broken or worthless but rather unfinished. And when you build your identity around being unfinished, you never get to rest inside the person you are right now.

Let me give you an example.

I’ve told myself I’d start dressing nicer when I lost weight. “When I get to ___ pounds, I’ll start buying nicer cloths”. The things is, I’ve been “losing” weight for years now. Lose weight. Gain weight. Up and down. Up and Down. Always in fluctuation. And because I set that weird and made up goal, in my mind, I couldn’t dress nicely. No one said that to me. No one sat me down and forbade me from trying to dress better. But to me, I wasn’t the version of myself that I wanted to be yet therefore, I put it off. When instead, I could just be dressing for the person I am now. Think of all the happiness I withheld from myself because of this mentality. All the things I missed out on because I wasn’t “there yet.” That’s one example but it exists for all of us. “When I get this amount of money, Ill do this…” “When I get this amount of followers, I’ll do this…” “If I get this promotion, I’ll finally do this…”. Scripts we all tell ourselves. They all feel like milestones that when we reach them, they will be this magical turning point where everything is going to reorganize itself internally.

There’s a name for this. It’s a psychological concept called “the arrival fallacy”. It’s the belief that once we reach a certain milestone, we will finally feel complete or permanently satisfied. It tells you that once you become the person you’re trying to be, then you’ll relax. Then you’ll feel secure. Then you’ll allow yourself to exist fully. It sounds naive when we say it out loud like this but in practice, it’s there for a lot of people. Very subtly.

I’ve been living inside of that promise for yearsssss. And it sounds so dumb and cliche to write it out like this but honestly, the realization that the years I labeled as preparation were my actual life and not just the “in-between”, hits weirdly hard. I’ve treated myself like a prototype of the real thing. As if there will be a moment where I finally earn the right to relax into who I am.

But I’m tired.

This is just the ongoing series of figuring out why I am so exhausted lately haha. I talked about closing loops in a previous post and that has helped IMMENSELY but I think this plays a part of it too. Some of this fatigue I’ve felt lately isn’t from doing too much but from orienting myself toward a future that never solidifies. From constantly measuring the present against a moving standard. I don’t want to wake up in ten years from now and realize I spent another decade preparing to begin.

If I’m being honest, I don’t even know what “arrival” even looks like anymore. The version of myself that I’ve been chasing is blurry. Undefined. I just know I’m not him yet. And that has been enough to keep me restless.

But what if there is no final version… then what am I waiting for? What if this is him? The one who is still figuring it out. The one who is ambitious and inconsistent and reflective and sometimes overwhelmed. The one who writes long essays trying to decode his own exhaustion.

There’s something uncomfortable about accepting that.

Ambition is not the villain here though. I don’t want to pretend it is. Ambition has built structure in my life. It has pulled me forward. It has sharpened me. It has given me purpose. I want to build. I’m not giving that up. I care about growth. I care about becoming better. I still want to chase things that scare me.

But I also want to inhabit.

I want to enjoy dressing well now, not at some imaginary weight. I want to appreciate the projects I’ve already built instead of immediately reducing them to stepping stones. I want to let an ordinary Tuesday be an actual part of my life, not just a bridge to something else. I can just exist.

Maybe there is no grand arrival. Maybe there’s no day where everything fixes itself internally and I suddenly feel complete. Maybe life isn’t structured like that. Maybe it’s just a series of moments that I either inhabit or miss.

And I don’t want to keep missing them.

I don’t know how to perfectly balance these two forces yet. I suspect it’s not something you solve once. It’s a practice. It’s noticing when you treat today as a means instead of an experience. It’s remembering that the journey people romanticize isn’t metaphorical. Maybe I’ll always have ambition. Maybe I’ll always be wired to build and refine and chase. That’s part of me. But I don’t want that wiring to steal my ability to sit inside the present moment without trying to extract something from it.

There is no final version coming, so I might as well be here.