Chronic Regret as Counterfactual-Rumination Wrong Attractor: The Road Not Taken Architecture, Upward Comparison Loop, and the Return to Acceptance and Forward Agency

Chronic regret — persistent rumination about past choices and the roads not taken — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CR in the landscape of acceptance and forward agency. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as acceptance and forward agency: acknowledging genuine past mistakes, grieving actual losses, extracting lessons, and re-engaging with present possibilities.

W_CR arises when regret detaches from learning and becomes pure counterfactual rumination: the person rehearses alternative timelines comparing them favorably to actuality, generating dissatisfaction that motivates further rumination. Nine formal propositions characterize Gilovich and Medvec's action-inaction temporal asymmetry, Kahneman's counterfactual thinking, Roese's functional-dysfunctional distinction and the ZIVA model, perfectionism as basin deepening factor, and return paths through self-compassion, decision acceptance, and meaning-making from actual life lived.