How It Started / How It's Going

Origin

The format began as a personal post. On September 23, 2020, a Twitter user posted two images — a screenshot of an early direct-message exchange, and a photograph of themselves with their partner — labelled “how it started” and “how it ended.” The tweet took over 25,000 likes and 1,100 retweets within two weeks.

The second label changed as the format spread. “How it ended” gave way to “how it’s going,” which is open-ended rather than final, and that small edit is what made the template universal — it works for anything still in progress, not just stories with a conclusion.

What it means / how it’s used

The structure is a two-image before-and-after, and its whole appeal is the gap between the panels.

Its main modes:

• Sincere — a modest beginning and a genuine achievement: a first apartment and a house, a first gig and a sold-out venue, a rejection letter and a job.
• Ironic — a hopeful beginning and a disappointing present, which became at least as common as the sincere version.
• Absurdist — where the second image undercuts the first entirely.
• Institutional — brands, sports teams, and organisations posting their own histories.

How it spread

It broke out in late September 2020 through relationship posts, then expanded within days to careers, fitness, education, personal milestones, and gender transitions. Brands joined almost immediately, as did sports accounts posting archive photographs.

Its timing is inseparable from its success. The format arrived several months into a year defined by disruption, and it gave people a way to mark progress — or to joke about its absence — in a period where both felt unusually pointed. A great deal of 2020 usage was explicitly about the pandemic: the January version of a plan, and the reality of it by autumn.

Its reach was documented formally: researchers at Utah State University’s Digital Folklore Project named it the digital trend of the year for 2020, and it was covered widely in the press as the year’s defining format.

Notable examples & variations

• Relationship posts, the format’s original use.
• Career and achievement milestones.
• Ironic downturn versions where things got worse.
• Brand and sports-team archive posts.
• Three-panel extensions adding “how it’s actually going.”

Legacy / cultural impact

How It Started / How It’s Going is one of the very few meme formats to be genuinely universal — usable by anyone, about anything, with no cultural knowledge required and no template to download. It needs only two images and four words.

That simplicity has given it unusual staying power. It is still in regular use years later, and it has effectively become a standard way of presenting a before-and-after online — closer to a piece of formatting convention than a meme, which is the highest a format of this kind can climb.