The chaos of becoming: A guide for the young and confused

Young adulthood is a strange little limbo where you’re technically grown and yet still googling, what is my personality type?  Identity sounds like an attractive concept, but you want it with a step-by-step user manual that explains in high definition how to become the best version of yourself. The world expects you to know who you are, while you’re still deciding whether you prefer iced coffee or emotional stability.

Growing up used to mean getting a driver’s licence and learning how to pay a bill without crying. Now it’s a full-blown existential project. At twenty, you are expected to have a personal brand. At twenty-two, a curated feed. At twenty-five, a portfolio of accomplishments that signal hustle culture. No pressure.

The mess of becoming – in public

Young adulthood has always been messy. The only difference now is that the mess is public. It’s hard to experiment with identity when the whole world feels like it’s lurking behind a screen, ready to catch your mistakes in 4K resolution. Negotiating identity is like a high-stakes game: Who am I? Who should I be? And why does everyone else look like they have a brand strategy while I’m still wondering if I’m normal?

There is a fog of constant comparison. We don’t scroll anymore, we take inventory. We count the likes, the views, the followers, and how many seconds someone lingered on a post before swiping away, as if our self-worth is the price of Bitcoin.

The currency of visibility

Visibility has become a currency. But like all currencies, it demands something in exchange. Usually, self-esteem. A tension lives in the young adults of today, an almost frantic desire to be seen. Acknowledgement isn’t enough, there is a need to be witnessed; preferably in HD. Social media is built on the illusion that the right moment, the right angle, or the right sentence can secure permanent relevance. Spoiler, it can’t.

Somewhere along the way, the digital world became an arena, and the users became performers. A moment of silence online feels like drowning, and a drop in engagement feels like a personal failure. The nervous system interprets visibility as exposure, and exposure, at its most primal level, has always been a threat.

Pursuing belonging over attention

The generation accused of being obsessed with attention is, in reality, obsessed with belonging. Followers look like approval, likes look like acceptance, and views look like a seat at the table. But the deeper desire is simple: the desire to belong. Preferably without selling your soul to an algorithm.

What suffers most in this race is identity. When visibility becomes a goal, selfhood becomes a product. The temptation is to design an identity for an audience, not a personality for a life. The longer we play a character, the harder it becomes to find the way back to who we really are. And who we really are doesn’t always get likes.

Forging identity in a performative age

The part we often forget is that identity isn’t discovered. It’s forged. Assembled. Very slowly and awkwardly, through trial and error and several phases that we privately disown later. It’s supposed to feel confusing. And if it doesn’t, you’re probably not doing it right.

Young adults are trying to find their agency. Not the Pinterest variety, the real version of it. The kind with the tiny, shaky steps of saying no and choosing themselves. It’s not rebellion the way older generations imagine it; it’s quieter, something like emotional boundary-setting disguised as personality development. It’s realising that belonging and becoming are sometimes in conflict, and then choosing becoming anyway.

Slowing down and thoughtfulness rarely trend. Authenticity doesn't travel as fast as shock. When it becomes clear that nuance doesn’t go viral, young people will often contort themselves into shapes that somehow fit, but in doing so barely recognise themselves, simply hoping that the algorithm approves of the performance.

Choosing depth over display

It’s rarely said out loud that visibility is not the enemy. What harms us is the scale at which we pursue it. We have started to believe that numbers can substitute for connection. A dangerous illusion, especially when half those numbers are bots.

Audience diffuses into community when you stop treating yourself as a product. Being seen isn’t the same as being understood. Visibility becomes meaningful only when it serves the person behind the screen, not the algorithm in front of it.

Becoming yourself, again and again

Today’s young adults are not lost. They’re in the middle of construction. The scaffolding looks chaotic because construction always does. Identity takes courage, especially in a world where the desire to be visible collides with the discomfort of becoming. But you don’t become yourself once. You become yourself over and over again. And each time, you’re a little less afraid, a little more intentional, and a little closer to belonging to yourself rather than the performance of being fine.

- Sammar Shabir is a Certified Mindset Coach and Author of The Barred Window, a new novel exploring belonging and the emotional and psychological aspects of finding one's identity.