I'm somewhere on the spectrum, with many of the stereotypical traits (special interests, sensory sensitivity, social difficulties, emotional processing trouble, sensitivity to disruptions, you name it). It makes me good at some things and bad at others. It has, at times, made my life very hard, and it has at times made things that are very difficult for others trivial for me.
But that's not really any different from how people vary from one another in general. It just so happens that the way in which I vary is shared with many others and has a name.
I'd say the same about ADHD. I don't know if I have ADHD, specifically, but I certainly have some form of related executive dysfunction. It makes it very hard to focus on something tedious (I spent a solid hour trying to type up a few paragraphs of interview feedback for someone earlier while getting constantly pulled off onto other things). But it also means I temperamentally have to constantly be learning and growing because I'll wither and die if I don't. That has made some things (like doing repetitive daily tasks) hard, but it makes other things (like the fact that as a founder I have to do about seven different jobs at a time) fun and easy when they would crush many people.
I agree with you that we don't need to pretend that things that hurt us don't. The difficulties matter, in part because acknowledging and understanding them is a part of finding our own personal brands of excellence. But I also don't think we need to treat the ways in which we're different as a curse, either. It's just how we are, and we have to figure out the best way to live within those constraints, the same as anyone else. Sometimes that means tolerating the things that we can't change, sometimes that means routing around them, sometimes that means figuring out ways to make them work in our favor.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that my life has gone far better starting from the premise of "this is the way I am and I have to work with that while recognizing the realities of interacting with a world that operates on different rules from mine" than it has from the premise of "I'm broken and I need to fix myself so I'm like others". In that sense, I think that acceptance, and even celebration in the right ways, can be good. It's just a way to say "it's not wrong to be what you are, and you should try to be the best version of that thing, not the best version of someone else".
> I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that my life has gone far better starting from the premise of "this is the way I am and I have to work with that while recognizing the realities of interacting with a world that operates on different rules from mine" than it has from the premise of "I'm broken and I need to fix myself so I'm like others".
One may accept without either self-hatred or celebration. This is the way things are, this is what there is. No need to embellish either negatively or positively. I think either path leads to poor outcomes societally.
I might sound like a stoic, but I am definitely not one. The reason is that I spent a lot of my life trying to pretend I was above my emotions, unperturbed by such forces in my higher realms of logic. This...uh, wasn't true. I was feeling as much as anybody, and my actions were being guided by my feelings as much as anybody. I just wasn't listening to my feelings or aware of how much they were dictating about my life.
Emotions are as essential a part of a person as cognition is. The Universe doesn't prescribe any particular things as good or bad, praiseworthy or evil, interesting or boring. In the world of pure logic, there is no difference between me deciding today to not drink any water and dying in a few days versus me living a long, full life of rich goodness to my fellow man.
The problem is not having emotions, but confusing them with beliefs. Emotions aren't there to tell us what's a good idea, they're there to tell us what's a fun one. Both are important. So we use our reason and our emotional regulation to make better decisions about how we may have the most fun (where "fun" here is standing in for whatever broader notion of personal utility you might choose). Even the literal Buddha was pretty clear on the idea that there's not much value in depriving oneself of one's human pleasures - only in not being controlled by those impulses.
And I would say that taking satisfaction in the positive traits you have is a pretty basic human pleasure.
Can't speak for GP, but I have similar feelings... some things are dramatically harder, others easier... for the most part I just develop coping mechanisms for as much as I can and try to accept other pieces. Not a matter of self-hatred or celebration so much. Though I have dealt with a lot of depression in my life from a general difficulty in interaction.
One can reason their way through a lot of things, even a lot of the why's of emotion over time. To recognize when you are going into a state of reacting on emotion over reason. It's hard.
My daughter faces a lot of similar issues and it's harder for her than it was for me. The best I can do is try to instill a sense of drive to adapt and overcome as opposed to just giving up and/or wallowing in things. I wish my parents were better equipped to do this for me. I was close to 40 before a lot of things started to fit together. A few years ago, working with someone that had similar personality issues dialed to 11 so to speak that a lot of things became much more clear.
I can recognize a lot of what you wrote to be true for myself,although my diagnostic was made very recently. The most difficult part for me is to be understood and accepted for who I'm, probably because it was hard for me to accept who I am. For years, I've been fighting to be like "anyone else" which eventually led me to be rejected, misunderstanding and considered "sick" (sic) by others, especially the most significant ones in my life. This is one of the trait of my life which is difficult to handle and makes me sometimes feel miserable.
A confounding variable is that neurodivergants are more culpable to being traumatized and suffer greater dysfunction when traumatized.
Being on the ND spectrum (and having been through the ringer of medical professionals, with god knows how many diagnoses) I know I have a different set of tools in my toolbox and I have painstakingly found my "niche" where I excel, and have worked hard to strengthen my weaknesses.
That's not to say I haven't seriously considered killing myself numerous times in the past due to foreseeing how hopeless and painful my life was to be. But that was primarily the trauma, and its effects on my executive function and the inability to adapt to my unique circumstances (ADHD being one).
However, I'm not blind to the fact others are not as lucky as I am to be able to have not only some semblance of free will and favorable circumstances to exploit to the best of my ability. Others are less fortunate, but I have to ask what portion of that (debilitating consequences) is simply a helplessness bestowed upon them from repeated trauma and a lack of favorable environment? I believe a good portion would fall under this camp. Ergo, their unique physchological makeups have not found an environment that fits.
I also suffer from ADD (non-H type). While I definitely acknowledge the validity of your point, having a view of the other side of the coin often helps to cope with these things. Not just cope, but moreso to keep in mind where we might best apply our efforts to have the greatest effect in our favor. It certainly helped me to have things reframed in such ways.
I think it's more a matter of degrees than a wholesale one view vs the other.
I didn't know that. Thank you.
I'll probably stick with ADD for most things though, because it seems like it's easier to say (barring my own qualifier for clarity) and people generally understand the distinction already. But this will be helpful in more technical circumstances, I imagine.
Nowadays the term ADD isn't even used casually by doctors or other people with ADHD... if someone told me they had ADD I would assume they were either self diagnosed, or diagnosed a long time ago and self treating, but not communicating with doctors or the ADHD community for at least a decade. The latter is important because there have been HUGE advances in practical advice on managing ADHD. Look at podcasts like "Hacking ADHD" and "How To ADHD."
It’s definitely not a superpower, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an adaptation that is well suited for certain niches. For example, it appears that individuals with ADHD are particularly adept at foraging.
It's tragic, that the whole "superhero" narrative around neurodiversity was probably meant to be hopeful, but yeah, it's almost the opposite nowadays. Plenty of people with autism e.g. don't have special skills, they just have it harder really.
Even despite that, I still find the idea hopeful and worth discussing. Whether something should be considered a strength or a weakness _does_ depend, at least in some cases and to some degree, on your perspective and actions.
Some superhero fiction even covers this aspect. A quite interesting example would be One Piece, where a number of people ate a special fruit that gave them superpowers, but they lose the ability to swim. Since the world is mostly ocean, that's a huge deal, and the main character is initially depressed about having made that trade, until he learns to appreciate his new powers.
So I guess this neurodiversity-is-a-super-power narrative can be both be bad (proper help and understanding is denied) and good (e.g. increased self confidence).
> We don't need to turn all pathologies into a positive trait to be cherished.
I don’t think your parent was doing that. As I understand this theory is that societies which take care of their disabled have a survival advantage over societies that don’t. Even though diversity is debilitating to the individual, it still benefits society as a whole.
A short description of the mechanism could be something like: Variability is the raw material for evolution through natural selection. Having a high cognitive and behavioral variability offers greater opportunities for societies to benefit from natural selection. Societies which take care of neuro-divergent individuals have a greater cognitive and behavioral variability.
Evolution is quite fine with individuals suffering, so long as it has a net effect of propagating genes being more likely.
There are likely many genetic and environmental factors that all contribute to ASD. A gene that is generally helpful, even if debilitating when paired with an unlucky combination of other factors, might still be very strongly selected for. Some people on the spectrum deeply suffer, but for every such case there are many more moderate cases, to the point we might not even recognize them as being on the spectrum, that can be very successful under the right circumstances.
I think you're taking this the wrong way. I understand that it probably feels patronizing and you don't give a shit that a trait you have that makes your life personally hell might be good for the health of the species overall, but I still think it is. I get into this with my wife every now and again because she had ADHD and has often argued she shouldn't procreate because of it.
That kind of perspective is narrow to the current human environment, which is not permanent. We're living in a tiny infinitesimal speck of the spectrum of the whole biological timeline of earth, let alone entirely different planets we might someday inhabit. Her constant worry and distractedness might be disadvantageous in a world that requires you to concentrate on unstimulating tasks and in which the threats you see yourself surrounded by are largely imagined and extremely unlikely to be realized. But that is because we currently live in a society of laws and stability, presumably somewhere near the height of civilization. There is no guarantee it will always be this way. When shit hits the fan and the threats get real, my perfectly well adapted to the current world self who fixates for days at a time on narrow tasks, pays little attention to surroundings, and worries about almost nothing, will get killed off within days if not hours. It'll be up to people like her and you to give humanity a chance to make it into the far future.
This is why we need diversity. Because even if it sucks to be you who isn't well adapted to the current moment, the current moment is short. It doesn't mean you're a superhero. It just means we have no idea what sorts of traits and behaviors might keep us going under drastically different future pressures and we may as well keep as many different traits around as possible just in case.
I reject your premise entirely. The decades spent living unmedicated taught me that even when I was free to pursue my own interests, I was unable to engage with any of them in any depth, even those artistic or that might otherwise be a more suitable fit to certain spheres of human activity some argue (ignorantly) I'd have an evolutionary advantage in.
It impacts everything: healthy regulation of emotions, satisfaction in relationships intimate and platonic, frequency of damaging behavior like substance abuse, and addiction to novel sensory media.
It's novelty-seeking that is broken, that's all there is to it. We are lucky medication is available. Others who struggle with other mental pathologies are not so lucky.
Self-hatred is not the answer. So is any attempt to make it a virtue. You can just be with the acknowledgement of a maladaptive state.
You reject his premise but you did not refute it. Reiterating the adaptive struggles you and other ADHD sufferers face does not invalidate the idea that it is a competitive advantage under certain circumstances.
I did refute it, vociferously. If you have evidence for it being an evolutionary advantage, you are welcome to present it. The only scientific argument I've seen presented is that it made us better foragers but I ask you, who is foraging today? It's an utterly absurd position to take that it is a competitive advantage in a scenario no one in the first world will ever encounter.
Sounds like you don’t even dispute his point, so how could you have refuted it?
To your point about relevance : nobody here has claimed this competitive advantage is wildly useful in a “first world” context, something the GP actually framed explicitly.
Personally I don’t think one needs to invoke post apocalyptic scenarios, as there are plenty of “first world” professions or scenarios that benefit from the same skill sets - military, emergency medicine, firefighting, just to name a few. The first world isn’t all spreadsheets and jira tasks.
I honestly don't know where you're going with this. You're theorizing about a condition you presumably don't have and then extrapolating your theories to professions you imagine to fit your idea of the "skillset" people with ADHD supposedly have.
There is not a skillset attached to the diagnosis of ADHD. There is no time to develop a skillset when the mind is constantly roving and unable to concentrate.
Im diagonsed Adhd and I definitely had years of great success before being medicated. Theres advantages to all the things you're saying under the right circumstances.
Also quite frankly just about everyone suffers in one way or another. How do you know your issues were more than average?
I'm sorry to hear about the struggles this has put you through, but I might mention that it is not universal that diagnosed sufferers of ADHD are unable to engage with their interests. In fact often direct interests can be highly engaging, while things that need to be done but are not interesting are debilitatingly difficult (executive dysfunction).
As with ASD and neurodivergency at large, ADHD is a spectrum, with differing impacts for differing people.
Could not disagree more. Nothing is “interesting” in perpetuity. Hence why so many with ADHD engage with various topics in an intense but sporadic manner.
In the overwhelming majority of cases this scattershot approach is deeply frustrating for the individual, and orders of magnitude less productive - in terms of meaningful creation and innovation - than persevering on a focused set of tasks.
I don’t think your comments are in conflict, being engaged with an interest does not necessarily mean being directly engaged with a project/task related to that interest. I definitely empathize with the scattershot approach being frustrating, but i think that comes out of an intense interest in a topic, and a lack of ability to focus on a specific task, even if it is self-selected and related to an interest.
I can think of many examples of times where I was unable to complete a project (in part) due to a drive to answer every question that I encountered in the process, and questions branching from those answers. So yes it does definitely impact productivity and perseverance for specific tasks, but I would separate that from the unique ability to learn intensely about interesting topics with reasonable depth and exceptional breadth that ADHD seems to give.
They are not our superhero abilities and they often come with extremely debilitating consequences.
I know many people on the spectrum and they suffer.