PhronesisLegitimate concern about existential and catastrophic risks — climate change, AI, pandemics, nuclear war — is adaptive: it motivates action, policy change, and preparation. Doomerism is a wrong attractor W_doom in which concern has collapsed into certainty of catastrophe: a stable cognitive-affective configuration where the bad outcome is treated as inevitable, agency is experienced as futile, and the foreclosed future prevents engagement.
We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize doomerism. The engaged uncertainty ground state S0_engaged is defined as the capacity to hold genuine concern about catastrophic risks while maintaining epistemic humility about outcomes and behavioral engagement with amelioration — Macy and Johnstone's active hope as the adaptive response. W_doom is maintained through the inevitability narrative (the bad outcome is already determined, making present action meaningless; self-sealing: progress is dismissed as too little too late, deterioration is amplified) and the agency collapse mechanism (if outcome is inevitable, acting is irrational; Bandura's collective efficacy as prerequisite for collective action, foreclosed by W_doom).
Nine formal propositions cover: S0_engaged as active hope ground state (P1), W_doom as catastrophe-lock wrong attractor (P2), the inevitability narrative and its self-sealing structure (P3), agency collapse via learned helplessness at civilizational scale (P4), the paradoxical relief function of doomerism (P5), online doomer communities and collective wrong attractors (P6), climate doomerism specifically and the grief-doomerism distinction (P7), cumulative Phi_doom across agency, behavioral, relational, and political domains (P8), and return paths including active hope, epistemic recalibration, and grief work (P9).