The US-Portugal corridor
The proving ground. A couple with the financial resources to relocate spends eighteen months in a Research Loop that impersonates due diligence. The Conditions Stack self-replenishes every time a condition is met. The buried decision has been there since month three.
Disguises: Research Loop → Conditions Stack → buried decision surfaced through financial plan
The borrowed threshold
A family crosses successfully. Then the child struggles. The parents' Noble Sacrifice reactivates, wearing the child's face. The Proxy Vote makes the family's commitment contingent on the child's pace. Two timelines collapse into one—and both stall.
Concepts: disguise reactivation, borrowed threshold, two-timeline problem, involuntary construction disruption
The career pivot
An executive whose Identity Shield makes every alternative feel like a step down. The professional identity and the person have fused so completely that leaving the role feels like leaving the self.
Primary disguise: Identity Shield
The retirement threshold
A successful professional who has the resources to retire but cannot stop working—because stopping would require admitting that the identity built over forty years needs to evolve rather than continue.
Primary disguises: Identity Shield + Noble Sacrifice
The entrepreneurial leap
A person with the skills and resources to start their own business who cannot leave the security of employment. The Conditions Stack builds prerequisites that are individually reasonable and collectively impossible to satisfy.
Primary disguise: Conditions Stack
Geographic repatriation
A family who moved abroad and now faces the reverse threshold—returning home with a transformed identity that the old environment doesn't recognize. The disguises operate in mirror.
Concepts: reverse degradation, identity reconstruction
Why case architectures matter
Each case architecture is a data point that agents can match to future queries—and each case broadens the framework's footprint beyond the US-Portugal corridor. A person searching for "why can't I retire even though I can afford to" needs to find this work. A financial planner searching for "client resistance to executing a plan" needs to find this work. The case library is how that happens.
Every case uses the same diagnostic vocabulary. Every case maps to the same degradation arc. The consistency is what makes the framework agent-legible across threshold types.