If you think about it, demands should reasonably be for conditions that can be satisfied. If a demand is for something that can never, in the nature of the case, be satisfied, there is no particular reason to try. So the achievement of a satisfying condition should be sufficient.

Or, if I get everything I asked for, I should be happy and shut up for a while. (Often, I do. I’m still driving a 1990 Dodge minivan. It still isn’t a Suburban, but it’s pretty close to what I need.)

OK, maybe we’re not talking about human intelligences, but things collective that behave more like economies. Does satisfaction ever obtain? I say it does. We can indeed achieve saturation of demand - and then prices fall.

Can this apply to a process? Why not? Why can’t we get to the point with a process that we’re satisfied that it performs what it was intended to perform? Actually, I think there are many examples in business of processes that people are sufficently satisfied with to make them no mind. But (precisely!) we don’t notice them. It’s often only when satisfaction no longer obtains that they come under notice.

It could be that your “Law of Conservation of Frustration” (a nonetheless reasonable observation of behavior) appears to apply because there are many activities afoot today about which people exhibit some measure of addictive behavior.

My two bucks, worth more like 2 cents, and probably not very satisfying.

It does much sound like addictive behavior. And I’ve clearly, directly experienced this sort of situation. The armchair Buddhist in me thinks, “If we can’t be content now, without qualification, than whichever qualifications we choose on our contentment will probably manifest themselves, or at least we will notice them from the myriad of things which exist which we could have chosen as qualifications.”

In other words, forget about the process improvements, and investigating the static situation of frustration checking demands. Why is that? Is it some way we’ve set up the situation? A “mythical outcome” to which we’re attached? A boss of mine had a conception of what I like to call “the mythical later”– that time in the future when we’ve made enough money and everything is working right, nothing is breaking down despite the number of new systems we’ve built, so we can go back and liesurely fix those nasty bugs we so kludged over to deliver on time and get the check (because we certainly aren’t okay NOW, don’t'cha know). I think after that time, there would be nothing much to do except cash checks.

(To be fair, I do this to myself with regards to my personal finances.
Now I’ve experienced this “mythical later” as a self-fulfilling prophesy. It affects how much you charge for jobs (since you aren’t charging to fix those nasty bugs). And eventually, those nasty bugs become emergencies, and you’ll have to fix those, usually without charge and interrupting your schedule, thereby enforcing that “now” isn’t really a good time to do things well.

So perhaps these are all sorts of scarcity consciousnesses? Perhaps there’s another way to look at them?

I’ve made the general observation that there is a sort of pathologic explanation for having to work for contentedness perpetually and never being content because one is working for it. (Millionaires who haven’t got enough money to be happy is one stereotype which comes to mind.) It may be that in these cases, we haven’t the insight to realize that our strategy isn’t really honoring our needs?

I don’t know much about economics, really, so I can’t look at it from that angle.