The Nostalgia Trap as Temporal-Displacement Wrong Attractor: The Idealized Past Construction, Present Devaluation Loop, and the Return to Historical Continuity

The nostalgia trap — the chronic idealization of a past period such that the present is systematically devalued by comparison, creating a temporal displacement that forecloses present engagement — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_NT in the landscape of historical continuity. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as historical continuity: the capacity to maintain a connected narrative with one's past while remaining present-engaged and future-oriented.

W_NT is explicitly distinguished from healthy nostalgia, a well-documented positive phenomenon (Sedikides et al.) that enhances social connectedness, self-continuity, and meaning. In W_NT, the past becomes an idealized standard against which the present systematically fails, and progressive withdrawal from present investment deepens the basin. The political dimension is characterized: golden age nostalgia at the collective level constitutes a group-level W_NT with distinct basin-deepening mechanisms.

Nine formal propositions characterize the memory idealization mechanism, the present devaluation loop, transition adversity and identity threat as basin-deepening factors, collective political nostalgia, the distinction from healthy nostalgia and genuine historical grief, and return paths through narrative integration, present-anchoring, and grief for genuine losses.