PhronesisCompulsive networking—the driven accumulation of professional and social contacts beyond any calibrated relational need—represents a structurally coherent wrong attractor in the space of relational behavior. We argue that this pattern is best understood not as a failure of social skill or an excess of ambition, but as a displacement from the ground state S^0, defined as calibrated relational depth: a condition in which connection is proportioned to genuine mutual presence, interest, and reciprocity.
Using a dynamical-systems displacement framework, we formalize the wrong attractor W as a self-reinforcing loop in which contact accumulation simulates the phenomenology of connection while systematically foreclosing the conditions under which genuine intimacy becomes possible. We introduce the depth-foreclosure basin as the geometric structure within which this wrong attractor operates, and analyze the contact-override architecture as the mechanism by which breadth suppresses depth.
Nine formal propositions characterize the system's behavior. We then describe exit dynamics: the return to S^0 via quality-over-quantity reorientation, tolerance of relational vacancy, and deliberate depth investment. The framework connects to empirical literature on loneliness, weak-tie theory, and the sociology of transactional relating. This paper argues that the subjective experience of being well-connected and the objective condition of being genuinely known are not only distinct but frequently anticorrelated under compulsive-networking dynamics.