The question is easy to dismiss. Of course you are growing. You made a change. But people run away and call it growth all the time. New city, new job, new relationship, same person with different scenery. The honest version of the question is harder: is the thing you are moving toward actually requiring something new of you, or is it just different enough to feel like progress?
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would push on this from very different angles. They do not agree with each other, and the disagreement is where the real question lives.
James: what does it change in practice?
William James would start with a practical test. His philosophy of pragmatism holds that an idea is true insofar as it helps us get into satisfactory relations with experience. Apply that to growth: if what you are calling growth is real, it should be producing different outcomes, different reactions from you, different choices at the same forks in the road. The question is not how you feel about the change. The question is what it is actually changing.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
He would also note that this test takes time. You cannot apply it in the first week after a change. Running away and growing can look identical at the start. The difference shows up when you hit the same kind of situation that used to stop you. What happens then is the data.
Dostoevsky: the motive underneath the motive
Dostoevsky would go somewhere darker. His characters are extraordinary at constructing justifications for what they want to do anyway. The Underground Man has a thousand reasons for everything. Raskolnikov has a theory. What Dostoevsky would say about your situation is: there is a reason underneath your stated reason, and you probably know what it is, and you are hoping the question of growth versus escape gives you cover not to look at it.
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.
This is not an accusation. Dostoevsky is not saying you are wrong to move. He is saying that the underground motive is always the most interesting one, and it will follow you wherever you go if you do not name it. What are you running from that you have not said out loud yet?
Horney: the idealized self has to go first
Karen Horney would offer a specific diagnostic. She spent her career mapping the tyranny of the idealized self: the inner image of who you are supposed to be, the standards that are impossible to meet and impossible to drop. Her question about growth is whether you are moving toward your actual self or toward a new version of the idealized self. Running away often involves upgrading the fantasy, not dismantling it.
The perfect compulsive drive for perfection is not only a drive toward perfectionism but equally a flight from imperfection.
Real growth in her framework involves grieving the idealized self, not finding better scenery for it. If the move you are making still has the same image of who you will finally become once you get there, you are probably in flight. If the move is requiring you to let go of that image entirely, something different may be happening.
Where they disagree
James would say: watch what actually changes over the next few months. That is your answer.
Dostoevsky would say: the answer is already in you. Stop asking the question and look at what you are avoiding.
Horney would say: ask whether you are chasing a new version of the idealized self or actually letting it go.
The deepest disagreement is about method. James says watch the outside. Dostoevsky says look at the inside. Horney says look at the inside, but more specifically at the part you built to protect you from yourself.
The question you came here to avoid
The reassuring answer is that you are growing. The honest test is harder than asking. James would tell you to wait and watch the evidence. Dostoevsky would tell you the evidence is already there, in the thing you have been careful not to say. Horney would tell you to look at what you are still holding onto, the image of who you will be once this change finally pays off.
None of them would give you the answer. All of them would point at the same place. What would you have to let go of, not gain, for this change to count as real?