Compulsive Meaning-Seeking as Existential-Anxiety Wrong Attractor: The Meaning-as-Antidote Architecture, Significance-Requirement Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Meaning Engagement

Compulsive meaning-seeking is formalized as a wrong attractor W_CMS within the displacement framework: the compulsive pursuit of meaning, purpose, and significance — not because life is genuinely felt as purposeful but as a primary strategy for managing existential anxiety; meaning is sought as an antidote to dread rather than discovered as a natural property of engaged living. The healthy ground state S0 is calibrated meaning engagement: the capacity to live purposefully without requiring continuous meaning-confirmation; to be present to experience without needing it to be significant; to find meaning through engagement rather than pursuit.

Three mechanisms sustain the meaning-seeking basin: meaning-as-anxiety-antidote (existential anxiety is experienced as intolerable; meaning is pursued as the specific antidote; meaning sought as an antidote to anxiety cannot fully satisfy because the seeking is organized around anxiety management rather than genuine discovery); significance-requirement escalation (each meaning-discovery provides brief relief before the existential baseline reasserts; the next meaning must be grander to produce equivalent relief; ordinary, modest, local meaning becomes insufficient; the person requires cosmic significance); and present-experience bypass (the compulsive search for meaning is forward-oriented and abstract; it prevents full presence to immediate experience, which is where meaning actually lives).

The Meaning Paradox states: compulsive meaning-seeking reliably prevents the discovery of meaning; genuine meaning emerges from fully inhabited experience, deep commitment, and accepted limitation; the anxious search prevents inhabiting experience and accepting limitation; the person who most urgently needs meaning is least able to find it because the urgency itself is the obstacle.

Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor. Distinguished from genuine philosophical inquiry. Return paths include present-experience engagement, meaning-as-discovery practice, and IFS work on the meaning-seeker and dread exile.