Life’s not a linear ascension, so it should be fine! Sometimes a misstep too opens new doors.

To echo what the other person replying to you has said, I’m going to share with you a way of thinking about this that I find quite useful. It’s something I learned about while studying biochemistry, so it’s not intended to be applied to ideas of personal progress, but I find it a useful analogy. It might not click with you like it does me, but that’s okay — I’m sharing it in case you or someone else finds it useful.

So the background context for the diagram that I’m going to share is that when proteins are first made and need to fold up into the correct shape in order to do their job, this happens in multiple different stages usually. Because we’re talking about chemical stability here, then in this case, lower energy is better, because it means that things are more stable. This means that in contrast to the OP, where upward steps are better, in this analogy, going downhill is good.

The key concept here is the idea of a local minimum. If you’re a ball that wants to get to the lowest point possible, then a local minimum is a ditch that it’s possible to get stuck in. What can be tricky is that when you’re in it, you can’t tell that you’re in a local minimum, because all you can see is that anywhere you could go from here would be worse than where you’re at.

I don’t know how legible the drawn labels on this diagram are, but imagine you’re starting out where the pink ball is, at A. You think you’re doing pretty well, because you’re definitely in a minimum point, but you obviously can’t know the entirety of what is possible.

Then as things start to change, you start moving up the large hill to your right (the arrow labelled B), and that feels like your progress is degrading, because you’re worse off than you were at the start. But you keep trucking onwards, and finally you’re able to reach the peak of the hill, at which point you get to go “Weeeeee!” as you roll down and start making real progress again (arrow labelled C).

But before long, you reach the bottom of that ditch (purple ball labelled D), and you’re dismayed to realise that you’re in a worse position than where you started. You might wonder what’s the point of even trying, if this is the result of all your effort. But you decide to keep pushing forward and exploring what’s possible, moving up the hill labelled “E”, as depressing as it might feel to be regressing again.

After a much shorter climb this time, you’re at the top of that hill, and you get to have a much more fun slide down the arrow labelled F, finally making real progress. You end up in the position of the blue ball, labelled G. On this diagram, it’s the global minimum — the most optimal point it’s possible to be. If you were to reflect on where you have ended up compared to where you started, you’d see that you’re much better off than you were before. You’d be able to look back on all those unpleasant periods where you felt like you were getting worse and understand them as being necessary to get to where you are now.

Now, the big difference between us and proteins is that there isn’t really a global minimum for us — the world around us changes so much that even if we hypothetically find our optimum point, the landscape changes that we need to keep moving to find new optimums. But the key takeaway here is that exploration is necessary to find the global minimum.

Letting ourselves enjoy the stability of sitting in a local optimum can feel nice, but I also find it quite demoralising in a way — there have been times in my life where I have objectively been doing well in a stable kind of way, but wondering “is this is all there is, is it really worth the effort?”. And then when I try to find something new for myself, it hurts because it feels like I’m losing progress. But improving things for ourselves often requires periods of “regression”, even if sometimes that involves realising “okay, I’ve explored much of the available landscape and it appears that my starting point was as close to a global minimum as I’m likely to find for now”.