It’s ok to embrace a stereotype if the stereotype is a cool, edgy one like neurodivergence. Stereotypes are convenient scaffolding for people who feel unmoored.
I have a kid (14) who is autistic and his autistic identity is whiplash for him. On one hand he really does get along with other ND people better - all of his friends are - and it helps him normalize his own situation as someone who is just fundamentally different in a core way than what other people and society as a whole expects. If that were the whole deal he would wear the flag publicly. On the other hand he’s quite aware of how people sink into self blame behind the label and how the whole label and diagnosis situation attracts a bunch of “helpers” who are really uncomfortable with him being himself even if it’s not bothering anyone, and who look at him in a condescending way almost as a project. In the end he just wants what most people want- he wants his normal to be accepted as normal.
I'm 38 and was never formally diagnosed with ADHD or anything until a few years ago, when tiktok began serving me all the ADHD content, I was like "holy shit is this not normal?" - and it was a lot of stuff like what you describe: standing in the kitchen, mal-adaptive work patterns (procrastination, etc), inability to do X even though I need to do X, etc. I've often felt like these traits were annoying but pretty common, so I like never thought anything of it. I just thought I sucked at prioritization or something (which is true)
Went to a psych who had been suggesting for years I might have ADHD (in addition to depression) and got an Rx for Vyvanse. Totally changed the way I can focus during the work day and my ability to do tasks I don't want to do literally went up 100x. Especially true in my new "work from home all the time and also do 100% of the parenting" post-covid post-divorce life.
Since then I've had an off an on relationship with the drug. I feel like it's a cheat in life and there is some tradeoff I haven't learned yet, like I'm going to get Alzheimers at 55 or something. Selling my soul at the crossroads in order to make better spreadsheets...
My gf often likes to say she has 27 tabs open, 3 are frozen, and there's music coming from an unknown tab that she can't turn off.
She'll joke about this being the natural product of a raging Gemini, or that it's in her maternal DNA. But she never says a word about ADHD, or being speshal. Rather, this is just the way she is. Perhaps, like myself, she has no social media presence and feels no inclination for the type of public self-aggrandizement that seems to be a requirement for basic web interaction these days.
That, or she's just a neurotic normy like the rest of us...nothing spesh about that.
Aug 8, 2022·edited Aug 8, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer
As someone who by any definition "has ADHD," I'll say two things that I hope will be relevant -
1) Freddie, the brainfog you describe from your meds basically gave you ADHD, so you know what it's like... When you describe the brain fog, I 100% relate, as it's how I feel when I don't have Concerta in my system. As I believe that my condition doesn't make my feelings and perceptions totally different from everyone who doesn't have the condition, I read your description of the brain fog and conclude "Freddie's experience with meds makes him officially know what ADHD feels like."
2) Sometimes I think this stuff sadly is a sign of how generally immature (in terms of self-perception) most people online are. This is based on just how much more I used to obsess over self-perception and also be online... and as I told myself "just do your best in your job and your relationships and you won't have to worry about your identity so much" I stopped going online as much.
I honestly think that there's a self-selection bias going on here and that many of the people posting about their special ADHD are going through a phase... I was very into ADHD as an identity for a few months, but then that stopped giving me anything good, so I drifted away from framing things through my diagnosis.
I often suspect that, while, yeah, there are a lot of influencers who will be "ADHD influencers" and thus make the obsession their identity, a lot of the people who spend so much time online posting about ADHD... I suspect that we're often seeing a rotating cast of people who get into it, experience the diminishing returns, and then stop being into their diagnosis as an identity.
What's interesting about that is that online, a mass movement of peopel committed to a belief looks the same as immature people going through phases and then getting replaced by people who are also immature and going through phases every few years.
In my utopia every ADHD-based influencer would come with a warning to the effect of: These ideas will give you a confidence boost in the short term but don't think about your diagnosis like this forever.
As someone who has ADD, manages it fairly successfully the usual way (Adderall), and otherwise does not find it something to celebrate or base one’s sense of self around… what’s really annoying about the “neurodivergence” discourse is how it usually boils down to a big nothingburger. Guess what? Companies that supposedly celebrate neurodiversity are gonna be managed, organized, structured, and otherwise run in all the exact same ways as always. All the processes and tools are going to be whatever your boss is comfortable with, up to and including purposefully inflicting deliberately unstructured systems on you because they personally like the “flexibility.” Whether or not anything is substantively better or worse at a company for someone with ADHD basically just boils down to whether it’s well and humanely run, or is otherwise just a shitty place to work. Just like always.
I agree with most of your analysis here, Freddie. I am a clinical psychology professor, and I thought for years that we needed to de-stigmatize mental illness; but now we have ended up with the opposite problem due to the role of social media. It's not healthy for people to define the core of their identities by their disorders! So I largely agree with you. But I did want to mention one critique. You have offered some good examples of people with ADHD over-interpreting their experiences through a diagnostic lens. But it is also true that ADHD is associated with problems with emotion regulation, and those emotion regulation problems are often a bigger source of difficulty in daily life than are the symptoms of inattention and impulsivity. This piece by Russ Barkley does a nice job outlining what we know about this link between ADHD and difficulties with emotion regulation: https://www.additudemag.com/desr-adhd-emotional-regulation/
If anything, astrology offers less of an out here than self-diagnosed neurodivergence. At least with astrology, if the moon on Tuesday is really bad for you to send out job applications, you better make hay on Thursday when Jupiter is where it needs to be. With Tumblr psychology you're just a helpless victim of your own mental quirks all the time.
I’ve beaten this drum here before, I think, but I struggle with the prevalence of adult ADHD especially following the pandemic. It feels as though, at this point, I have more friends with a recent ADHD diagnosis than without one. In terms of actual numbers, that’s probably not true; but if I start counting, it’s upwards of 5 people around me in the past 2 years. Tons of them learned they had it because they saw relatable twitter or tiktok content about it.
I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist. Maybe that many people around me all had the same neurological disorder all the time I knew them and I just had no clue. But I can’t help but wonder, when so many of them “learned” they’d “always been this way” six months after transitioning to fully remote work, tied to a desk in their own house 8-10 hours a day, feeling the anxiety of having to perform dull, meaningless work without the stimuli of coworkers’ conversation, errands to get up and run, the ordinary, pleasant changes of scenery in a normal day.
It just about broke me, and I work a job I generally like - during the pandemic it often felt like my brain was chasing me away from the computer. But I think the mind built to cheerfully perform the solitary screen-based drudgery much work now demands is rare, and I think adult ADHD discourse has fed a lot of people the lie that it’s their difficulty that is the anomaly, rather than drawing attention to the fact that staring and clicking all day in the same rooms where we eat and sleep is a shitty way to live and most people probably can’t do it.
Another issue here is the way that all this “specialness” actively undermines our sense of solidarity with those around us. Rather than working together to build a platform that supports our common, flawed, humanity and help us all to thrive, there is a generation that thinks the fight to demand a bigger share of (often artificially) scarce resources based on whatever “unique” ailments we can define ourselves by.
“Standing in the kitchen wondering why” ok I’m 60 and well, hey younger folk—guess what’s coming your way too! :) ‘Normal’ sounding stuff imho.
It’s ok to embrace a stereotype if the stereotype is a cool, edgy one like neurodivergence. Stereotypes are convenient scaffolding for people who feel unmoored.
I have a kid (14) who is autistic and his autistic identity is whiplash for him. On one hand he really does get along with other ND people better - all of his friends are - and it helps him normalize his own situation as someone who is just fundamentally different in a core way than what other people and society as a whole expects. If that were the whole deal he would wear the flag publicly. On the other hand he’s quite aware of how people sink into self blame behind the label and how the whole label and diagnosis situation attracts a bunch of “helpers” who are really uncomfortable with him being himself even if it’s not bothering anyone, and who look at him in a condescending way almost as a project. In the end he just wants what most people want- he wants his normal to be accepted as normal.
I'm 38 and was never formally diagnosed with ADHD or anything until a few years ago, when tiktok began serving me all the ADHD content, I was like "holy shit is this not normal?" - and it was a lot of stuff like what you describe: standing in the kitchen, mal-adaptive work patterns (procrastination, etc), inability to do X even though I need to do X, etc. I've often felt like these traits were annoying but pretty common, so I like never thought anything of it. I just thought I sucked at prioritization or something (which is true)
Went to a psych who had been suggesting for years I might have ADHD (in addition to depression) and got an Rx for Vyvanse. Totally changed the way I can focus during the work day and my ability to do tasks I don't want to do literally went up 100x. Especially true in my new "work from home all the time and also do 100% of the parenting" post-covid post-divorce life.
Since then I've had an off an on relationship with the drug. I feel like it's a cheat in life and there is some tradeoff I haven't learned yet, like I'm going to get Alzheimers at 55 or something. Selling my soul at the crossroads in order to make better spreadsheets...
My gf often likes to say she has 27 tabs open, 3 are frozen, and there's music coming from an unknown tab that she can't turn off.
She'll joke about this being the natural product of a raging Gemini, or that it's in her maternal DNA. But she never says a word about ADHD, or being speshal. Rather, this is just the way she is. Perhaps, like myself, she has no social media presence and feels no inclination for the type of public self-aggrandizement that seems to be a requirement for basic web interaction these days.
That, or she's just a neurotic normy like the rest of us...nothing spesh about that.
As someone who by any definition "has ADHD," I'll say two things that I hope will be relevant -
1) Freddie, the brainfog you describe from your meds basically gave you ADHD, so you know what it's like... When you describe the brain fog, I 100% relate, as it's how I feel when I don't have Concerta in my system. As I believe that my condition doesn't make my feelings and perceptions totally different from everyone who doesn't have the condition, I read your description of the brain fog and conclude "Freddie's experience with meds makes him officially know what ADHD feels like."
2) Sometimes I think this stuff sadly is a sign of how generally immature (in terms of self-perception) most people online are. This is based on just how much more I used to obsess over self-perception and also be online... and as I told myself "just do your best in your job and your relationships and you won't have to worry about your identity so much" I stopped going online as much.
I honestly think that there's a self-selection bias going on here and that many of the people posting about their special ADHD are going through a phase... I was very into ADHD as an identity for a few months, but then that stopped giving me anything good, so I drifted away from framing things through my diagnosis.
I often suspect that, while, yeah, there are a lot of influencers who will be "ADHD influencers" and thus make the obsession their identity, a lot of the people who spend so much time online posting about ADHD... I suspect that we're often seeing a rotating cast of people who get into it, experience the diminishing returns, and then stop being into their diagnosis as an identity.
What's interesting about that is that online, a mass movement of peopel committed to a belief looks the same as immature people going through phases and then getting replaced by people who are also immature and going through phases every few years.
In my utopia every ADHD-based influencer would come with a warning to the effect of: These ideas will give you a confidence boost in the short term but don't think about your diagnosis like this forever.
As someone who has ADD, manages it fairly successfully the usual way (Adderall), and otherwise does not find it something to celebrate or base one’s sense of self around… what’s really annoying about the “neurodivergence” discourse is how it usually boils down to a big nothingburger. Guess what? Companies that supposedly celebrate neurodiversity are gonna be managed, organized, structured, and otherwise run in all the exact same ways as always. All the processes and tools are going to be whatever your boss is comfortable with, up to and including purposefully inflicting deliberately unstructured systems on you because they personally like the “flexibility.” Whether or not anything is substantively better or worse at a company for someone with ADHD basically just boils down to whether it’s well and humanely run, or is otherwise just a shitty place to work. Just like always.
I agree with most of your analysis here, Freddie. I am a clinical psychology professor, and I thought for years that we needed to de-stigmatize mental illness; but now we have ended up with the opposite problem due to the role of social media. It's not healthy for people to define the core of their identities by their disorders! So I largely agree with you. But I did want to mention one critique. You have offered some good examples of people with ADHD over-interpreting their experiences through a diagnostic lens. But it is also true that ADHD is associated with problems with emotion regulation, and those emotion regulation problems are often a bigger source of difficulty in daily life than are the symptoms of inattention and impulsivity. This piece by Russ Barkley does a nice job outlining what we know about this link between ADHD and difficulties with emotion regulation: https://www.additudemag.com/desr-adhd-emotional-regulation/
So should I close more tabs or open more tabs to be neurotypical?
If anything, astrology offers less of an out here than self-diagnosed neurodivergence. At least with astrology, if the moon on Tuesday is really bad for you to send out job applications, you better make hay on Thursday when Jupiter is where it needs to be. With Tumblr psychology you're just a helpless victim of your own mental quirks all the time.
I’ve beaten this drum here before, I think, but I struggle with the prevalence of adult ADHD especially following the pandemic. It feels as though, at this point, I have more friends with a recent ADHD diagnosis than without one. In terms of actual numbers, that’s probably not true; but if I start counting, it’s upwards of 5 people around me in the past 2 years. Tons of them learned they had it because they saw relatable twitter or tiktok content about it.
I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist. Maybe that many people around me all had the same neurological disorder all the time I knew them and I just had no clue. But I can’t help but wonder, when so many of them “learned” they’d “always been this way” six months after transitioning to fully remote work, tied to a desk in their own house 8-10 hours a day, feeling the anxiety of having to perform dull, meaningless work without the stimuli of coworkers’ conversation, errands to get up and run, the ordinary, pleasant changes of scenery in a normal day.
It just about broke me, and I work a job I generally like - during the pandemic it often felt like my brain was chasing me away from the computer. But I think the mind built to cheerfully perform the solitary screen-based drudgery much work now demands is rare, and I think adult ADHD discourse has fed a lot of people the lie that it’s their difficulty that is the anomaly, rather than drawing attention to the fact that staring and clicking all day in the same rooms where we eat and sleep is a shitty way to live and most people probably can’t do it.
Deleting this. Thank you for the kind comments. ❤️
Another issue here is the way that all this “specialness” actively undermines our sense of solidarity with those around us. Rather than working together to build a platform that supports our common, flawed, humanity and help us all to thrive, there is a generation that thinks the fight to demand a bigger share of (often artificially) scarce resources based on whatever “unique” ailments we can define ourselves by.