Productive Satiation Failure

Every appetitive behavior the human organism engages in comes equipped with a termination signal. The architecture of these signals is not incidental to the motivational system—they are, as Deirdre Barrett argues, load-bearing walls. Without them, every drive would run to exhaustion. The termination signals for productive work operate through three distinct mechanisms: the boredom signal (declining novelty of the current task), the cognitive fatigue signal (accumulating impairment of performance quality), and the diminishing-returns signal (falling marginal reward as a project approaches completion). In natural work environments, all three engage reliably, and their convergence produces the experience of being done—the natural stopping point that requires no act of will, only the quiet satisfaction of a system that has reached its boundary. AI-augmented work disrupts all three simultaneously: novelty is continuously replenished by the model's varied responses; cognitive fatigue is masked because the tool handles the most demanding mechanical work; and the marginal-return