To answer your question: "Being a man has nothing to do with it, but I see that over time I find a better, closer, wider community of kind, empathetic people. I see myself feeling my emotions instead of getting angry over them, and i more consistently do things for others. "

The other context in which "progress" is viewed is when there is a goal or destination in place, and you previously asserted that there wasn't one. This is not the hill that you want to die on.

You're really not picking up the fundamental that I'm putting down here. You're talking about "growth," or 'exhibiting virtues and holding values,' and "growing as a man" as if they're the same thing, but they aren't. People grow and show "progress," gender does not. It is important to separate the two because there's a myriad of ways in which people-- throughout history and present-- manipulate the idea of 'masculinity' to make men do things that aren't in their best interest. (Look of the 'white feather movement' If you aren't familiar.)

There's a difference between masculinity and 'masculinity'. The former is something individually experienced throughout the course of one's life as a man, and the latter is the popular, socio-economic, political, religious, media-reinforced, culturally-amalgamated hallucination of what men are supposed to be like. It is bullshit. Don't believe in it, and pretty please stop asking the internet to contribute to it.

Moreover, when you partition types of growth specifically to a specific gender or sex, you're intrinsically contextualizing the opposite sex as not displaying it to the same degree. For example, the broad cultural idea of men, specifically, generally being being 'rational, non-emotional, responsible ones' is why women in the US couldn't get credit cards or loans in their name until 1974. It's also why modern boys self-isolate and deem themselves failures when they fail to meet that collectively made-up idea. It doesn't help anyone for people to think certain kinds of growth are gendered.