Persistent Mismatch, Diminished Perceived Agency, and Withdrawal

This preprint develops a theorem-driven structural account of sustained withdrawal under conditions of persistent mismatch, diminished perceived agency, repeated failure of meaningful goal-coupling, and insufficient buffering. Rather than treating school absence, work withdrawal, or burnout-like disengagement as primary conditions, the paper analyses them as possible downstream manifestations of orientational breakdown under prolonged sociocognitive strain. The paper begins from a minimal set of structural commitments concerning expectation-reality mismatch, perceived agency, meaningful attainable goals, orientational coherence, buffering, and withdrawal as a potentially stabilising short-term response. From these commitments, it develops a wider architecture of linked theorem families concerning withdrawal, visible manifestation and causal mislocation, institutional misrecognition, and fragmented coordination. The present article develops the withdrawal family in full. It derives four theorems concerning orientation collapse, the insufficiency of purely symptom-level restoration, nonlinear threshold disengagement, and withdrawal as a short-term stabilising response under sustained incoherence. It further specifies positive and negative observable implications, temporal-ordering expectations, falsification conditions, boundary conditions, and an initial empirical instantiation logic. The paper does not claim to explain all forms of absenteeism, burnout, psychological distress, or non-participation. Nor does it offer clinical guidance, a diagnostic instrument, or a complete policy programme. Its contribution is structural and diagnostic: to specify the conditions under which stable long-run participation becomes unavailable and visible withdrawal becomes intelligible as a downstream response rather than merely a failure of compliance, motivation, or resilience. Within the Society, Democracy, Organisation, and Education Research Programme, the paper functions as a support and bridge text connecting educational mismatch, social burden transfer, human viability, and individual load-bearing collapse.