PhronesisCompulsive task-switching is the reflexive abandonment of a current engagement in favor of a new one at the first sign of friction, difficulty, or boredom. We formalize this pattern as the Context-Hop Architecture (CHA): a behavioral and cognitive regime in which the discomfort of sustained engagement becomes the trigger for perpetual task-rotation, producing a systematic avoidance of the depth that only persistence can reach.
We situate the CHA within the Phronesis dynamical framework, identifying it as a wrong attractor W that opposes the ground state S^0, defined here as calibrated focused continuation—the capacity to remain engaged with a task through its difficult middle register and emerge at genuine completion or genuine learning. We introduce the Sustained-Engagement Foreclosure Basin (B_ SEF) as the dynamical region from which return to S^0 is progressively barred by compounding avoidance habits, identity lock-in, and the structural impossibility of mastery in domains that require prolonged exposure.
Nine propositions organize the theory: discomfort-intolerance primacy (P1), the novelty burst as operant reinforcer (P2), accumulation of started-but-unfinished work (P3), restless-person identity lock-in (P4), mastery foreclosure (P5), the diagnostic distinction between adaptive context-switching and compulsive escape (P6), the necessity of passing through the discomfort threshold on the return path (P7), gradual recalibration via timed-focus practice (P8), and the grounding of S^0 stability in the capacity to stay (P9).
We conclude that the return to S^0 is not primarily cognitive but somatic and volitional: it requires choosing, repeatedly, to remain.