Chronic Risk Aversion as Safety-Compulsion Wrong Attractor: The Loss-Salience Architecture, Unlived-Life-Accumulation Basin, and the Safety Paradox

Chronic risk aversion — the chronic pattern of systematically avoiding all domains of meaningful risk, organizing life around loss-prevention rather than value-pursuit, producing progressive life contraction and the accumulation of unlived possibility — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CRA in the landscape of calibrated risk engagement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated risk engagement: the capacity to assess risk proportionately, engage with meaningful uncertainty when the potential value justifies it, and take action in the face of genuine uncertainty — without either reckless exposure or compulsive avoidance.

W_CRA is rigorously distinguished from appropriate caution in genuinely dangerous situations, healthy risk calibration, legitimate financial prudence, and adaptive risk reduction in high-stakes domains. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: loss salience asymmetry (the chronic risk averter weights potential losses dramatically more heavily than equivalent potential gains; D(ξ) is generated by any situation where outcome is uncertain; expected-value-positive risks are rejected and life contracts progressively toward the guaranteed-mediocre), safety-as-identity (caution becomes a character trait and moral virtue organized in contrast to reckless others; identity investment in caution makes risk engagement feel like self-betrayal), and unlived-life accumulation (each avoided risk leaves a residue of unlived possibility; the accumulation generates an undercurrent of regret that confirms the world as a place where loss is the main risk).

The Safety Paradox is central: chronic risk aversion reliably produces the loss it is organized to prevent — by systematically avoiding meaningful risks, the chronic risk averter loses the experiences, relationships, creative works, and life developments that constitute a genuinely lived life. Nine formal propositions characterize the calibrated risk engagement ground state, the safety-compulsion wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the safety paradox, developmental roots in environments of genuine insecurity or early catastrophic loss, and return paths through graduated risk-taking, loss aversion recalibration, IFS work, ACT values clarification, and regret minimization reframing.