{
  "id": "insecurity.proximity",
  "term": "insecurity",
  "sense": "proximity",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 15,
  "domain": "emotional",
  "style": "window",
  "definition": "a self-model that reports the wall as near however far from it the parameter actually is, so its maintenance goes to a wall that is not there.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "self-model.reflexive",
      "self.personal",
      "model.representation",
      "report.information",
      "wall.range-end",
      "near.spatial",
      "far.distance",
      "parameter.condition",
      "actually.real",
      "maintenance.upkeep",
      "go.movement"
    ],
    "interaction": "The self-model's proximity report is decoupled from the parameter's actual position, so upkeep is continuously routed toward defending an edge the system is nowhere close to.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "position-independent alarm",
      "misdirected maintenance",
      "phantom wall defense"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "A student with top grades prepares every exam as if a single failure would end the degree.",
      "domain": "education"
    },
    {
      "text": "An employee rereads a neutral one-line email from a manager as the start of a dismissal.",
      "domain": "workplace"
    },
    {
      "text": "A load balancer tuned to treat every latency blip as impending failure spends its capacity on migrations it never needed.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "confidence.width",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "insecurity reports the near wall wherever the parameter sits; confidence reports the model's own range as narrow - one misreads the wall, the other the width"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "insecure",
    "insecurities",
    "insecurity"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5:curated-selfmodel",
    "date": "2026-08-22",
    "confidence": 0.8,
    "sources": [
      "curated self-model expansion"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-insecurity.proximity"
}