Job Loss as Multi-Domain Ground State Disruption: Employment as S⁰ Anchor, Unemployment as Accumulated Displacement, and the Identity Crisis of Involuntary Exit

We apply the Displacement Framework to job loss and unemployment, formalizing employment as a six-component ground state S°_employed extending far beyond income: financial security, time structure (the temporal anchor of the working week), social contact and belonging, collective purpose and contribution, status and social identity, and activity engagement. Drawing on Jahoda's latent functions model, job loss imposes simultaneous six-domain D(ξ), explaining why income replacement alone fails to prevent the psychological damage of unemployment.

Nine formal propositions are derived covering: S°_employed as the six-component equilibrium (income plus Jahoda's latent functions), job loss as simultaneous six-domain displacement, occupational identity disruption as primary self-concept D(ξ), long-term unemployment as basin deepening through secondary wrong attractors (skill attrition, employment gap stigma, demoralization reducing job search effort, depression from Φ accumulation), the scarring effect as progressive Φ accumulation making re-employment increasingly difficult, temporal disorientation as loss of the time-structure S°_employed component, social isolation from workplace network severance as secondary D(ξ_social), reemployment as primary return path with skill retraining as landscape modification, and unemployment insurance as D(ξ) duration reduction through financial floor maintenance.

Automation and AI-driven structural unemployment are analyzed as mass ground state disruption requiring landscape-level rather than individual-level interventions.