PhronesisEnvironmental management is a normal and necessary dimension of human functioning. In its calibrated form, the person maintains a living and working space that serves their actual needs, periodically releasing objects that have lost utility or meaning, and acquiring objects that genuinely add value. Compulsive decluttering is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CDL in the landscape of environmental and psychological functioning, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CES — Calibrated Environmental Sufficiency — which is the capacity to maintain a relationship with one's material environment that is responsive to actual needs rather than driven by internal distress.
The compulsive declutterer pursues relief from psychological distress through the progressive elimination of objects from the environment, and arrives, paradoxically, at a denuded space in which distress persists unresolved. This paper formalises the Decluttering Paradox: purging provides temporary and genuine relief from distress, but because the distress is psychological rather than environmental in origin, each purge cycle restores and then exceeds the baseline distress level, requiring escalating purges that converge on an empty room that cannot solve the problem it was recruited to address.
Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) physical-as-psychological displacement, in which external order is unconsciously recruited as a substitute for internal resolution — the person reorganises the material world because the psychological world resists reorganisation; (2) control-through-elimination encoding, in which the act of discarding becomes the primary available experience of agency and control, progressively replacing other modes of self-determination; and (3) minimalism-as-identity-performance, in which a culturally validated aesthetic framework is appropriated to give ideological cover to what is structurally compulsive behaviour — the person does not experience themselves as driven by distress but as aspiring to an enlightened relationship with objects.
Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the formal dynamics of the inner-emptiness-as-outer-emptiness basin, the escalating purge cycle, the persisting distress signature, and the return paths through calibrated environmental engagement, object-level tolerance building, and direct psychological attention. The paper draws on Frost and Hartl's foundational work on hoarding (the inverse syndrome), the KonMari literature and its compulsive uptake, Csikszentmihalyi on possessions and self-construction, Richins's materialism scale, Belk's extended self framework, Kaplan's environmental psychology, and the OCD and order-compulsion literature including Tolin et al.