Life often appears as two steps up, one step back—or—one step up, two steps back, but never standing still ad infinitum. It's like an open wound which can never remain as is. It will either begin to heal and improve or get infected and worsen depending on how it is treated.
Systems also can never be in perfect neutral equilibrium, or they would die. The person is its own system, either open or closed to the Real; and in that posture, his or her directionality becomes apparent. Life can never be a strict duality where one polarity cancels the other polarity out, it more like a triune dynamism where polarities are reconciled at a higher order or debased at the extremes.
We can't always quantify this, but we can know this if we are radically honest about our intentions.
Ultimately there is a telos in our being. Marcus Aurelius declares in his magnum opus, “So you were born to feel "nice"? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don't you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as they can? And you're not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands?”
Even during a time when safety and security was scarce, Marcus understood that creaturely comforts were not the ends to us. We are here to realize and be our nature. And to ultimately honor that in ourselves and others. Otherwise what we don't honor, will eventually get dishonored. There is no neutral vacuum. We either are moving forwards or backwards in ourselves and our surrounding culture.
Nikolai Berdyaev noted himself many years ago that “the world seems to moving not toward an organic, vital unity, but to an organized and technical unity.” For him, unity was the person and not the state or society. While we created liberal democratic orders in many nations, such “emancipation did not set free the whole man, it simply liberated thought itself, as a sphere quite apart from human existence: it was the declaration of autonomy for thought, not for man himself.” One could argue today we are even losing this freedom in thought with the advent of soft totalitarianism.
Berdyaev believed that liberalism was quite indifferent to Truth or to what it means to be a person. Within the confines of godless modernity, liberalism had reduced person to a functional individual as either animal and/or machine without a transcendent nature. And the fullness of the person can only be recaptured in our faith as the very essence of Truth where the qualitative nature of personhood and the content of all human life is made whole with God, nature, and fellowship with others. This goes beyond mere humanitarianism but becomes true humanity with persons-in-relation.
Personhood is the realization in man or woman of the image and likeness of God. It is not a socialized and objectivized individual subject to the state, economic life, or society. He is free to do what his nature demands! And this can only happen in the dynamism of the vertical and the horizontal to which he is made Whole to do his part and in the part be truly Whole.
Anything else is a step back.