How It Started vs How Its Going Memes With Real-Life Upgrades

Updated on December 8, 2025

I told myself I’d “tighten one bolt” on the CMS and—classic—slipped into how it started vs how its going memes while the snow tried to unionize outside. Nothing like a tidy glow-up and some wholesome memes to WD-40 the Monday brain.

These are the good kind: side-by-side transformations that make your coffee taste braver. You’ll see cap-and-gown victories, scrappy garage projects turned storefronts, and stubbly shelter pups promoted to sofa executives. The internet (hi Reddit and Instagram) still delivers when you need quick, wholesome memes.

30 Wholesome How It Started vs How Its Going Memes

If you skimmed during lunch, the story beats were obvious. Early panels handled the big arcs—tin-roof childhood to university ID, sketchbook doodles to gallery-ready canvases, “first day on the job” badge to the corner desk with a window. Even a Microsoft offer letter made an appearance, the grown-up version of finding a rare card in a pack.

Then came the heart-warmers: a sick stray leveling up to “spoiled prince,” father-daughter photo recreation at graduation, and a marathoner whose first picture was a rainy parking lot stretch. Those before and after photos work because they compress years into two frames your brain can file in one second.

Mid-gallery, the craft crowd clocked in—garage CNCs, bread bakers with perfect ears on the loaf, and plant parents resurrecting crispy sticks into jungles. Transformation pictures thrive on detail: paint under fingernails, a hand-me-down tool, a wall finally plumb. My hardware-store soul salutes the stud finder that actually found a stud.

Season’s doing its quiet part, too. December makes progress feel louder: frost on old windows in slide one, warm shop light in slide two. It’s why these how it started vs how its going memes hit harder now; they’re tiny space heaters for morale.

If you’re building a favorites folder, grab three: a career glow-up for email fatigue, a pet rescue for empathy resets, and a home-project fix to bully you into finally hanging the shelf. Label the stash “proof things get better”—future-you will appreciate the inventory.

And if your own “how it started” looks like a drawer of mismatched screws, join the club. Tighten one hinge. Sand one edge. Take a lopsided progress pic. The best galleries start as crooked measurements and a little duct tape.

Mike Hartley measures twice, cuts once, then admits he eyeballed it and got lucky.