The Return-Horizon Princible

The Return-Horizon Principle proposes a candidate general law of resource commitment, return, and temporal organization. It defines economy broadly as the allocation of limited and transformable resources toward the preservation, transformation, or expansion of system states. According to the principle, self-maintaining or goal-directed systems temporally organize their investable resources along expected-return structures. When the return horizon attached to an investment collapses, subsequent system dynamics diverge according to whether resources are reallocated, remain locked into an inaccessible return, or continue to flow after becoming decoupled from the return function. The affective domain is selected as a high-resistance test case because investment and return are obscured there by subjective meaning, unconscious processes, identity, culture, and multiple causation. The model predicts three corresponding temporal patterns: restored time following reallocation or portfolio integration; frozen time under capital lock-in; and a non-frozen standing present when allocation persists after active return-seeking has ceased. The paper integrates research on prolonged grief, continuing bonds, limerence, unrequited love, depersonalization, depression, trauma, and subjective time. It specifies rival explanations, falsification conditions, measurement strategies, and a staged empirical research program. The work is presented as a theoretical preprint and research proposal; the universality of the principle remains a testable higher-order hypothesis rather than an established conclusion.