PhronesisChronic career-path regret (CCPR) is here formally reconceptualised within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CCPR in the landscape of vocational self-concept functioning, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ voc (Calibrated Vocational Presence) to which the system would naturally return after ordinary professional disappointment. The object of displacement is not a past relationship or lost opportunity in the general sense, but the imagined parallel career: the profession not entered, the vocation believed to have been truly one's calling, the work-life now understood to have been foreclosed by circumstance, imposition, or a choice made under constraint.
The wrong attractor is sustained by three interlocking mechanisms. First, parallel-career idealisation: the unchosen profession is evaluated at its representative best—the inspired performance, the peak achievement, the ideal day's work—while the actual career is evaluated at its representative worst, producing a structurally unfair comparison that cannot be neutralised by evidence from the actual career's good days.
Second, sunk-cost-as-wrong-turn evidence: years of expertise and investment in the actual career are reinterpreted not as accumulated knowledge but as proof that one committed deeply to a mistake, so that professional seniority amplifies rather than attenuates the regret. Third, vocational identity-splitting: the “real self” is located in the imagined vocation, making the actual professional self feel persistently inauthentic, a role inhabited by someone who is not quite the person doing the inhabiting.
Together these mechanisms constitute what we name the Vocational Regret Paradox: the idealised parallel career is constructed from the actual career's failures but not its struggles, making the comparison structurally self-perpetuating. Nine propositions formalise the wrong-calling basin dynamics, the three sustaining mechanisms, the paradox, the developmental roots in parental career imposition and achievement-culture identity fusion, and four return paths: parallel-career reality-testing, expertise recognition in the current path, vocational-meaning excavation, and late-career pivoting where genuinely available.
The paper draws on Roese and Summerville's opportunity-cost model, Savickas's career construction theory, Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory, Hidi and Renninger's four-phase interest model, Frankl's logotherapy, and Super's developmental approach to vocational identity.