PhronesisChronic excitement-performing designates a compulsive behavioral pattern in which an agent systematically displays enthusiasm, interest, and delight that exceed, distort, or are entirely decoupled from the agent's actual affective state. We argue that this pattern constitutes a wrong attractor W against the ground state S^0 of calibrated authentic response — the condition in which expressed affect scales with genuine internal experience.
We identify two structural mechanisms underlying the attractor. The Interest-Simulation Architecture (ISA) is the learned assembly of enthusiasm-signals — vocal affect, facial expression, lexical intensity, somatic leaning — that operates as a social management device, deployed to maintain approval, signal likability, and forestall relational risk. The Genuine-Engagement Foreclosure Basin (GEFB) is the dynamic consequence: the compulsive simulation loop progressively displaces the agent's access to their own authentic reactions, foreclosing the possibility of genuine engagement even when it would otherwise arise.
We develop nine propositions characterizing the attractor's architecture: the primacy of social-acceptance anxiety as the initiating force (P1), the emergence of performed enthusiasm as an approval-seeking mechanism (P2), the paradox of others' detection of inauthenticity (P3), the enthusiast-identity lock-in that perpetuates the pattern (P4), the agent's own progressive disconnection from genuine reaction (P5), the distinction between courteous positive engagement and compulsive performance (P6), the centrality of the honest flat or muted response in return (P7), recalibration through sustained truthful-affect expression (P8), and the stability criterion for S^0 as reactions that scale with actual experience (P9).
We conclude with structural conditions for escape from the wrong attractor and the phenomenology of return to calibrated authentic response.