PhronesisSharing experience with others is a fundamental and adaptive human capacity. In its calibrated form, documentation and communication of lived moments enhances social connection, enriches memory, and contributes to a sense of a shared world. Compulsive social media posting is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CSP in the landscape of experiential and social functioning, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CAP — Calibrated Authentic Presence — which is the capacity to inhabit and engage with direct experience, and to share it with others from a position of genuine fullness rather than chronic need for external confirmation of one's existence.
The compulsive poster enacts what this paper terms the Witnessed-Life Architecture: the implicit schema that an experience is not fully real, valid, or meaningful until it has been documented, published, and received by an audience. This architecture generates a central paradox: posting is designed to share experience and connect with others, but compulsive posting degrades the quality of direct experience itself, because each experience is pre-curated for documentation rather than lived.
The moment is colonised by its anticipated representation. Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) Witnessed-Existence Encoding, in which the implicit belief that unwitnessed experience is ontologically incomplete drives compulsive documentation before the moment can be absorbed; (2) Engagement-as-Affirmation, in which quantified audience responses — likes, shares, comments, follower counts — function as a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule that creates an engagement-metric basin from which the agent cannot escape by ordinary effort; and (3) Documentation-as-Living, in which the act of posting progressively substitutes for the experience it purports to record, until the post is the primary event and the lived moment its raw material.
Nine propositions formalise the dynamics of these mechanisms, the degradation function linking posting rate to direct experience quality, the reinforcement schedule that sustains the basin, the anticipatory curation effect, and the return paths through presence practice, metric disengagement, and witnessing reorientation. The paper draws on Twenge's generational findings, Vogel et al.'s social comparison research, Sherman et al.'s neuroimaging of adolescent likes, Turkle's analysis of always-on connectivity, Ward et al.'s phone-presence cognitive cost studies, Festinger's social comparison theory, and self-determination theory to ground the formal treatment in established empirical literature.