PhronesisWe present a formal account of Chronic Aesthetic Perfectionism (CAP) within the displacement framework, characterizing it as a wrong attractor W_ CAP in the state space of self-regulatory behavior. The ground state S^0 we designate as Functional Inhabitation: the capacity to occupy, use, and move through an environment without subjecting it to continuous corrective intervention—a state in which the visual and spatial surround is background rather than foreground, and where the attention available for living is not systematically diverted into arrangement.
CAP presents as a cluster of compulsive behaviors organized around the visual and spatial environment: the inability to begin or sustain work in a space perceived as disordered, the compulsive rearrangement of objects (including rearranging configurations established by others), an escalating intolerance for visual asymmetry or misalignment, and the extension of these dynamics into digital environments (desktop organization, file hierarchies, interface aesthetics).
The condition overlaps with the symmetry/ordering subtype of OCD but is distinguished by the absence of obsessional fear content—the compulsion is organized around aesthetic distress rather than harm-avoidance cognition. Three sustaining mechanisms maintain W_ CAP against return: (1) visual-order-as-emotional-regulation, in which spatial arrangement functions as the primary tool for managing affective state, making disorder emotionally threatening at a register that bypasses cognitive appraisal; (2) perfection-threshold-escalation, in which each successful arrangement raises the standard for what counts as correct, so the space of acceptable configurations shrinks over time; and (3) aesthetic-control-as-domain-compensation, in which the visual environment becomes the privileged site of control precisely because other life domains are experienced as uncontrollable, completing a feedback loop in which visual order bears psychological weight it cannot sustain.
We formalize the central structural paradox: the arrangement that is intended to produce calm instead produces heightened sensitivity to disruption, so that each act of ordering makes the next disorder event more intolerable. This is the Arrangement Paradox. Return paths include deliberate disorder exposure, function-over-form prioritization practice, and the decoupling of emotional regulation from spatial arrangement.