PhronesisCompulsive self-improvement — the chronic pattern of treating oneself as perpetually inadequate raw material requiring continuous optimization, producing restless self-development activity organized around a moving-target sufficiency that is never reached — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CSI in the landscape of inhabited sufficiency. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as inhabited sufficiency: the capacity to be fully present in and as one's current self — to act, relate, rest, and engage from who one already is — while choosing growth from values rather than from self-deficiency anxiety.
W_CSI is rigorously distinguished from healthy growth (which is chosen, embodied, and leaves the person more present), genuine skill development, and appropriate response to real deficiencies. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the deficiency premise (the compulsive self-improver operates from a foundational conviction that their current self is not yet acceptable; this premise is unfalsifiable — each improvement reveals the next deficiency; D(ξ) is generated by inhabiting the current self rather than working on it), the arrival horizon (the sufficiency threshold moves forward with each advance; arriving at a goal reveals it as insufficient; the goal was a horizon, not a destination), and identity-as-project (the self-improver's identity is organized around becoming rather than being — always in transformation, always between versions; this forecloses inhabiting the current self because the current self is always transitional).
The Improvement Paradox is central: compulsive self-improvement reliably produces the inadequacy it is organized to resolve — by treating the current self as permanently insufficient raw material, the compulsive self-improver ensures they never inhabit sufficiency; the activity organized to produce a self worth inhabiting forecloses the capacity to inhabit any self. Nine formal propositions characterize the inhabited sufficiency ground state, the perpetual-deficiency wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the improvement paradox, developmental roots in conditional regard and optimization culture, and return paths through self-compassion, ACT defusion from improvement narratives, and distinguishing chosen growth from deficiency-driven optimization.