When Exit Becomes Structurally Expensive: Recoverability, Intervention Windows, and the Geometry of Non-Exit Systems

This paper introduces Non-Exit Geometry as a structural explanation for why individuals, organizations, and systems often remain in arrangements they no longer find rewarding, effective, or meaningful. Rather than attributing persistence to addiction, cognitive bias, or moral failure, the paper reframes non-exit as a consequence of recoverability loss and exit-cost asymmetry. Across games, digital platforms, careers, markets, and policy systems, exit remains formally available while becoming progressively unaffordable in practice. Using the IPCSALT–UPF diagnostic framework, the paper identifies a convergent signature of non-exit systems: Collapsing Recoverability Distance (D) Narrowing Intervention Windows (IW) Eroding Path Diversity (BPR) Accumulating Exposure Time (τ) Growing Structural Residue (Φ_Dark) Return Threshold Shift (RTS) Non-exit is analyzed as a two-surface misdiagnosis risk:external indicators suggest stability and freedom, while internal recovery geometry quietly contracts. The paper distinguishes non-exit from both lock-in and “invisible recovery” (Q3), clarifies the limits of physical metastability analogies, and shows how awareness alone cannot restore exit feasibility once structural costs exceed available agency. Finally, the paper proposes recoverability-based guardrails—design and policy constraints that preserve exit feasibility by protecting intervention windows, limiting irreversible loss, maintaining alternative paths, and exposing buried constraints before Joint Alignment Memory (JAM) consolidates. The core claim is simple: Freedom is not the visibility of exit, but the structural affordability of return.