PhronesisChronic comfort-seeking describes the compulsion to systematically minimize discomfort, challenge, and friction across life domains. We argue that this pattern constitutes a wrong attractor W in the dynamical sense: a stable basin of attraction that draws the agent away from ground state S^0, defined as the capacity for calibrated productive discomfort. We introduce the Ease-Maximization Architecture (EMA) to name the cognitive-behavioral infrastructure that generates systematic friction-avoidance, and the Growth-Tolerance Foreclosure Basin (GTFB) to name the region of state space from which engagement with necessary difficulty becomes increasingly inaccessible.
Nine propositions are developed: the primacy of discomfort-anxiety in triggering avoidance (P1); the short-term relief mechanism that reinforces flight (P2); the capability atrophy that accrues from sustained avoidance (P3); the identity lock-in that consolidates the comfort-seeker configuration (P4); the progressive shrinking of the perceived world (P5); the critical distinction between genuine rest and compulsive friction-flight (P6); the necessity of voluntary discomfort-entry for return (P7); the graduated exposure mechanism by which tolerance expands (P8); and the characterization of S^0 stability as the capacity to choose difficulty when it serves (P9).
The paper concludes with implications for practice: the return to S^0 is not a collapse of ease but an expansion of range.