PhronesisCompulsive documenting — the habitual, near-automatic recording of lived experience through photography, journaling, video capture, and digital logging — constitutes a distinct class of experience-mediation wrong attractor. We develop a formal framework in which calibrated witnessed living (hereafter S^0) designates the ground state of unmediated, attentive presence, and compulsive documenting (W) designates a self-reinforcing attractor basin from which spontaneous escape is dynamically suppressed.
We introduce displacement magnitude D() as a scalar field measuring departure from S^0 and the integrated displacement = D()\,dt as the cumulative presence-debt incurred by sustained operation within W. The record-override architecture — by which the impulse to capture pre-empts the impulse to inhabit — is characterized as a closed mediation loop that replaces direct phenomenal contact with anticipatory archival behavior.
We specify nine formal propositions governing the geometry of the presence-foreclosure basin, the self-amplifying structure of W, and the conditions necessary for return to S^0. We further discuss implications for social media compulsion, photography psychology, digital memory, and the ethics of attention. The paper concludes with criteria for calibrated witnessed living as a normative attractor and practical exit dynamics.