Compulsive Novelty-Seeking as Familiarity-Aversion Wrong Attractor: The Depth-Foreclosure Architecture, Commitment-Phobia Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Exploratory Depth

We apply the Displacement Framework (DF) to compulsive novelty-seeking (W_CCN), characterised as the chronic pattern of seeking new experiences, places, ideas, relationships, and projects—not because novelty genuinely serves growth, but because the familiar has become intolerable. Compulsive novelty-seeking constitutes a depth-avoidance wrong attractor in the DF landscape: the individual displaces from the healthy ground state S^0 (calibrated engagement—the capacity for deep, sustained engagement with what is already known, alongside genuine openness to novelty when it serves growth) into a basin W_CCN maintained by three interlocking mechanisms.

The first mechanism is familiarity-as-diminishment encoding: the experience of knowing something or someone well reduces their perceived value; the known becomes boring or claustrophobic rather than rich. The second mechanism is newness-as-aliveness substitution: genuine aliveness is experienced only during the discovery phase of any encounter, with deepening familiarity experienced as a form of dying.

The third mechanism is depth-foreclosure compulsion: the automatic exit from any situation, relationship, or field at the point where superficial novelty is exhausted, before the deeper layer of the known becomes accessible. The central paradox of W_CCN (Proposition P7, the Novelty Paradox) is that compulsive novelty-seeking, which aims to maximise richness of experience, systematically forecloses the depth of experience that emerges only through sustained engagement with the known—producing a life that is wide but not deep.

We derive nine formal propositions, examine the psychological architecture maintaining the wrong attractor, map developmental roots, identify return paths to S^0, and carefully distinguish W_CCN from healthy curiosity, appropriate exploration, and high sensation-seeking as a temperamental trait. The capacity for depth—the ability to discover that the already-known contains inexhaustible richness when engaged with patience and sustained attention—is not opposed to novelty but is the faculty that makes genuine novelty, as opposed to its simulation, possible.