When Value Becomes Burden: Personality, Privacy, and Destructive Impulse in MARP

This article develops a structural account of how what preserves the self may, under sufficient pressure, become burdensome to it. Working within the broader philosophical framework of Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points (MARP), it argues that personality collapse, burdensome privacy, rigid persistence in costly positions, and destructive attraction toward what is held to be of highest value are not isolated phenomena, but structurally related outcomes. The central claim is that organizing references remain stabilizing only so long as the cost of sustaining them remains within the self’s capacity for endurance and resumption. Once that threshold is crossed, what once functioned as support may become a source of strain, rigidity, collapse, or reversal. The article concludes by distinguishing normative centrality from structural sustainability and showing why what remains highest in significance may nevertheless become unlivable within the structure that bears it.