PhronesisChronic nostalgia-looping (CNL) is characterized here as a dynamical attractor in the affective-cognitive phase space wherein an agent's motivational and evaluative resources are preferentially captured by a temporally distant and progressively idealized past configuration, to the systematic foreclosure of present investment. We introduce a formal architecture: the state S^0 denoting calibrated temporal integration, the displacement cost functional D() measuring the energetic and evaluative penalty incurred by deviation from S^0 along a retrospective trajectory, and the cumulative displacement = D()\,dt as a scalar index of total present-investment foreclosure.
The wrong-attractor property of CNL is demonstrated through nine propositions spanning attractor basin depth, idealization drift dynamics, counterfactual inflation, somatic binding, social-reinforcement feedback, and the recovery pathway back to S^0. We argue that the attractor derives its stability not from the intrinsic value of recalled experiences but from the structural asymmetries between retrospective and prospective evaluation, from the foreclosure-loop that prevents falsification of past-idealization, and from somatic and narrative binding that converts selective memory into felt identity.
The paper closes with a constructive account of return to S^0 as calibrated temporal integration: neither nostalgic nor amnesiac, but fully inhabited in the present with the past accurately held.