Reality Drift: A Framework for Understanding Systemic Disconnection from Real-World Feedback

Reality Drift describes a systemic failure mode in which complex systems continue functioning while gradually losing alignment with real-world feedback, meaning, and outcomes.Rather than occurring as sudden collapse, Reality Drift emerges through incremental processes such as optimization for measurable metrics, abstraction from lived conditions, recursive information filtering, and compression of complexity into simplified representations. Over time, these forces can cause systems to remain operational and internally coherent while becoming increasingly disconnected from the environments they were designed to reflect.This preprint provides a foundational conceptual definition of the Reality Drift framework, outlining its core mechanisms, conditions of emergence, and relationships to related forms of divergence such as semantic drift, cognitive drift, and institutional misalignment.The framework is intended as a diagnostic lens for understanding modern technological, organizational, and cultural systems where performance indicators improve even as experiential fidelity and real-world alignment decline.