I can’t forage for missing sunglasses that are right in front of my stupid fucking face. My dumbass would be bringing back half a handful of poison berries like “This is all I could find and I have no memory of picking them but they probably didn’t come from the poison bush I guess.”
I have similar opinions about the “iT’s nOt a diSoRdEr iTs mOdErN sOciEtY” thing that’s going around lately. Even if we lived in a utopia, I’d still be expected to listen when others speak, cook without burning myself or the food, speak without repeating myself, speak in a way that makes sense to others, keep appointments, read and comprehend instructions, transport myself from place to place without injury or forgetting necessary items…
Yeah, I feel largely the same way. ADHD can have its occasional perks - it’s fun to hyperfixate on a topic of interest when I can afford to do so, and sometimes all the bits of random information that happen to stick in my brain can come in handy - but it’s not a “secret superpower.” It’s a disorder.
Exactly. NT’s don’t hyperfocus. Instead they can get themselves to focus on a task repeatedly and become good at something over time. Not only that, the more often they do the thing, the easier it gets for them to start doing the thing. They can make themselves do the thing even when they don’t feel like it! Start on time they want to. They can rely on themselves and others can rely on them too!
I think you might be missing the true depth of problems modern society has created. We live in atomised family units with walls and fences between us and our neighbours, and very few third places where community can be built. Society doesn’t just react to us, it changes us.
It’s fairly well documented that simply having someone else present makes an enormous difference in an ADHD person’s ability to focus on a task for instance. Plenty of ADHD people will recognise that they can’t clean their own house to save their life but they can go all day helping a friend, or with a friend helping them.
I understand that not interrupting people is a thing, but even the character of that behaviour changes fundamentally when you have to self edit in front of an authority figure, and there are so many expectations around how people must defer to a mechanistic existence that surely must change the way that we speak. Even the anxiety that so many neurodivergent people have I think is linked to this. I wonder how much more able to wait to speak you would be if you weren’t under this constant atmosphere of domination and control.
We are extremely time poor, and if we had more time to just hang out and tend to one another we would be much more able to learn each other’s quirks, be more patient, more able to negotiate a better way of interacting for each person.
The very idea that society is so normative guarantees that some people will be left out because they lack the ability to conform, whatever that looks like, and yet that same society that created these normative conditions refuses to acknowledge its failures in this regard, and it has to brand anyone falling outside of its demands such that they can’t live a normal life as “disordered”.
I mean being to smart was a weakness in yee days cause half our problems had no thinking solution, not being too strong has way less benefits - society is always changing and how ‘good’ something is is really only how we utilize it; ie others speak and an AI is able to translate the important bits if you miss them, timers that autoset themselves when youre cooking, projects are as easy to start and stop as blinking, and sweet Jesus Christ hopefully society will grow past the need for a million forms and appointments for anything important
(I compared my universities ADHD accessibility process to making the wheelchair accessibility office only accesable via stairs; theyre directly punishing what theyre supposed to help)
Id argue its a lot more useful for innovation and novelty seeking. Getting bored and finding a new food source or a new hunting ground is useful. Getting obsessed with a bunch of different subjects and tying disperate concepts together to generate new ideas is useful. Staying up later at night to protect the tribe when others would have gone to sleep hours ago is useful.
There are always trade offs and no neural diversity is going to always be useful. Sometimes its debilitating and sometimes its useful. Unfortunately in a world where you are expected to sit still in a gray cubicle under florescent lighting for 9 hours a day 5 days a week until your body falls apart too much to do it anymore, there are more cons than pros. But id argue that the majority that apparently arent driven mad by that dyatopian nightmare are the weird ones.
I love chillin’ with other ADHD’ers: most understand if you zone out and tell them that.
My colleagues also accept a “sry, that may sound a bit stupid; but my brain just cannot focus on this topic right now. I’ll come back to that later or tomorrow” (and as long as it’s occasional even a “sry, but my brain cannot do that at all. Can someone else please do this?”)
cook without burning myself or the food
I got a kitchen machine that does it for me. I can even forget my food without any chance of burning it. Worst case it’s cold.
speak without repeating myself, speak in a way that makes sense to others
Again, this is a problem I only have with neurotypicals; no problem along fellow neurodivergentd
keep appointments
Again just something that normal society expects. I have one single appointment per day I can’t miss (start-of-day-meeting). Everything else is movable most of the time. I don’t meet people at certain times, I meet them “that afternoon” and we will write each other when we’re ready
read and comprehend instructions
I know many neurotypicals that cannot do that.
transport myself from place to place without injury or forgetting necessary items…
Nothing to say against these points, actually…
What I want to say is that most of the problems you listed are based on the expectations of neueotypicaldom. All of my friends and some of my colleagues are neurodivergent (most ADHD, some ASD, some both, I’m both) and honestly: As long as I don’t have to interact with the neurotypical world I don’t run in that much problems. It’s still not perfect, but way more manageable.
press X to doubt
I can’t forage for missing sunglasses that are right in front of my stupid fucking face. My dumbass would be bringing back half a handful of poison berries like “This is all I could find and I have no memory of picking them but they probably didn’t come from the poison bush I guess.”
I have similar opinions about the “iT’s nOt a diSoRdEr iTs mOdErN sOciEtY” thing that’s going around lately. Even if we lived in a utopia, I’d still be expected to listen when others speak, cook without burning myself or the food, speak without repeating myself, speak in a way that makes sense to others, keep appointments, read and comprehend instructions, transport myself from place to place without injury or forgetting necessary items…
Yeah, I feel largely the same way. ADHD can have its occasional perks - it’s fun to hyperfixate on a topic of interest when I can afford to do so, and sometimes all the bits of random information that happen to stick in my brain can come in handy - but it’s not a “secret superpower.” It’s a disorder.
Exactly. NT’s don’t hyperfocus. Instead they can get themselves to focus on a task repeatedly and become good at something over time. Not only that, the more often they do the thing, the easier it gets for them to start doing the thing. They can make themselves do the thing even when they don’t feel like it! Start on time they want to. They can rely on themselves and others can rely on them too!
Now that’s a superpower.
I think you might be missing the true depth of problems modern society has created. We live in atomised family units with walls and fences between us and our neighbours, and very few third places where community can be built. Society doesn’t just react to us, it changes us.
It’s fairly well documented that simply having someone else present makes an enormous difference in an ADHD person’s ability to focus on a task for instance. Plenty of ADHD people will recognise that they can’t clean their own house to save their life but they can go all day helping a friend, or with a friend helping them.
I understand that not interrupting people is a thing, but even the character of that behaviour changes fundamentally when you have to self edit in front of an authority figure, and there are so many expectations around how people must defer to a mechanistic existence that surely must change the way that we speak. Even the anxiety that so many neurodivergent people have I think is linked to this. I wonder how much more able to wait to speak you would be if you weren’t under this constant atmosphere of domination and control.
We are extremely time poor, and if we had more time to just hang out and tend to one another we would be much more able to learn each other’s quirks, be more patient, more able to negotiate a better way of interacting for each person.
The very idea that society is so normative guarantees that some people will be left out because they lack the ability to conform, whatever that looks like, and yet that same society that created these normative conditions refuses to acknowledge its failures in this regard, and it has to brand anyone falling outside of its demands such that they can’t live a normal life as “disordered”.
I mean being to smart was a weakness in yee days cause half our problems had no thinking solution, not being too strong has way less benefits - society is always changing and how ‘good’ something is is really only how we utilize it; ie others speak and an AI is able to translate the important bits if you miss them, timers that autoset themselves when youre cooking, projects are as easy to start and stop as blinking, and sweet Jesus Christ hopefully society will grow past the need for a million forms and appointments for anything important
(I compared my universities ADHD accessibility process to making the wheelchair accessibility office only accesable via stairs; theyre directly punishing what theyre supposed to help)
Id argue its a lot more useful for innovation and novelty seeking. Getting bored and finding a new food source or a new hunting ground is useful. Getting obsessed with a bunch of different subjects and tying disperate concepts together to generate new ideas is useful. Staying up later at night to protect the tribe when others would have gone to sleep hours ago is useful.
There are always trade offs and no neural diversity is going to always be useful. Sometimes its debilitating and sometimes its useful. Unfortunately in a world where you are expected to sit still in a gray cubicle under florescent lighting for 9 hours a day 5 days a week until your body falls apart too much to do it anymore, there are more cons than pros. But id argue that the majority that apparently arent driven mad by that dyatopian nightmare are the weird ones.
I love chillin’ with other ADHD’ers: most understand if you zone out and tell them that.
My colleagues also accept a “sry, that may sound a bit stupid; but my brain just cannot focus on this topic right now. I’ll come back to that later or tomorrow” (and as long as it’s occasional even a “sry, but my brain cannot do that at all. Can someone else please do this?”)
I got a kitchen machine that does it for me. I can even forget my food without any chance of burning it. Worst case it’s cold.
Again, this is a problem I only have with neurotypicals; no problem along fellow neurodivergentd
Again just something that normal society expects. I have one single appointment per day I can’t miss (start-of-day-meeting). Everything else is movable most of the time. I don’t meet people at certain times, I meet them “that afternoon” and we will write each other when we’re ready
I know many neurotypicals that cannot do that.
Nothing to say against these points, actually…
What I want to say is that most of the problems you listed are based on the expectations of neueotypicaldom. All of my friends and some of my colleagues are neurodivergent (most ADHD, some ASD, some both, I’m both) and honestly: As long as I don’t have to interact with the neurotypical world I don’t run in that much problems. It’s still not perfect, but way more manageable.