PhronesisAutobiographical memory serves adaptive functions: it orients the self across time, provides experiential resources for navigating novel challenges, and constitutes the narrative substrate of personal identity. But the behavioral pattern of chronic reminiscing — the habitual, excessive recounting of past stories in conversation, the compulsive recirculation of a fixed anecdote repertoire across relational contexts, the systematic displacement of present-moment engagement by past-story performance — represents a wrong attractor W_ CR within the displacement framework, a stable configuration of the self-narrative system that forecloses the ground state S^0 of calibrated temporal presence: the capacity to inhabit current experience, share present-moment material, and generate new autobiographical content through ongoing engagement with the living present.
Chronic reminiscing is formally distinct from nostalgia (the emotional longing for a past time), from healthy autobiographical sharing, and from legitimate use of experiential wisdom. The pathological threshold is behaviorally defined: past-story frequency becomes pathological when it systematically forecloses present-moment relating, when the ratio of past to present narrative content in conversation indexes not accumulated wisdom but accumulated displacement.
Three interlocking mechanisms sustain the wrong attractor: past-story-as-identity-anchor, in which accumulated stories constitute a stable self-narrative when the present feels undefined or threatening; known-narrative-as-social-safety, in which a tested story is reliably received while present-moment sharing carries unmanaged social risk; and past-story-as-connection-substitution, in which telling about a past experience substitutes for the present-moment vulnerability that genuine sharing would require.
We introduce the Reminiscing Paradox: retelling past stories provides momentary identity coherence but forecloses the present-moment experience that would generate new stories, so that the past is recirculated to fill a present that becomes progressively emptier. Nine formal propositions, a table of diagnostic markers, and a characterization of developmental roots and return paths complete the analysis.