The Burden of Becoming: Exploring the Psychological Journey Beneath Everyday Life

What if the life we are trying to reach is the very life already passing through our hands?

Becoming begins remarkably early. As children, we prepare for what comes next. We learn, improve, qualify, and gradually become the person we are expected—or hope—to become.

Then one becoming gives way to another. Education leads to employment, employment to advancement. We build careers, relationships, families, homes, security, and futures for those we love, telling ourselves that once this goal is reached, this uncertainty resolved, or this stage completed, there will be room to settle.

But arrival rarely ends the movement for long. One goal is reached and another appears. Even retirement—once imagined as the point at which striving might ease—becomes ordinary life.

One becoming ends. Another quietly takes its place. The destinations keep changing, but the movement continues.

And the future really does arrive. Graduation becomes another morning. The first day at work becomes Tuesday. The new house becomes home. Retirement becomes another cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

Almost every tomorrow we prepare for eventually becomes today.

And then another tomorrow appears.

After more than six decades of living, Y S Prihar found himself asking: How can something so natural, necessary, and meaningful gradually become a burden?

The Burden of Becoming follows that question from childhood in northern India through immigration to Canada, education, work, family, achievement, uncertainty, and retirement.

What gradually becomes visible is not a problem with becoming itself, but another movement taking place alongside it. A conversation ends, but continues in the mind. A problem remains unfinished even when nothing more can presently be done. Yesterday is relived after it can no longer be changed. Tomorrow begins to be lived before it arrives.

The mind can continue beyond the point where reality has quietly said: Enough for now.

The more life means, the more there is to protect. What if worry, replay, regret, anticipation, and protection are expressions of one continuing movement?

This leads to one of the book's most intimate distinctions: Carrying is not the same as caring.

Caring can listen, help, remain available, and act when possible. Carrying can continue long after action has ended.

And while all this becoming, preparing, protecting, remembering, and anticipating is taking place, another life is quietly unfolding:

While we are building careers, children are growing. While we are planning security, marriages are being lived. While we are solving tomorrow's problems, ordinary evenings are becoming family history.

Looking backward, life appears in chapters: childhood, education, career, marriage, children, home, retirement. But while we were living them, they did not feel like chapters.

They felt like today.

So the question is not Should we stop becoming? It is: Where does useful becoming end—and psychological burden begin?

What happens when preparation becomes pre-living tomorrow, memory becomes reliving yesterday, or caring becomes carrying? And if so much attention is occupied there, what remains available for the life in which all of this is occurring?

The Burden of Becoming does not ask us to abandon ambition, planning, responsibility, or love. It offers no formula for happiness or prescription for living.

Its discovery is quieter: Not only the destination, but the life occurring while we are moving toward it.

The education mattered. The ambition mattered. The work mattered. The family mattered. The striving mattered. The becoming mattered.

But life had never been waiting for becoming to end.

It does not tell the reader what to believe. It invites the reader to look.

Y S Prihar is a Canadian author whose writing explores the psychological movement beneath ordinary life-the ways memory, anticipation, identity, security, and becoming shape our experience of the present. Drawing on decades of observation alongside experiences of work, family, migration, and everyday life, his writing approaches these questions through lived experience rather than prescription. The Burden of Becoming is his first published book.