mrwizrd

This is probably going to end up a big jumble and all of it is based on my personal experience only, I am not a doctor, and I have other neurological conditions that likely interact with/cause some of these, so take it all with a grain of salt.

It can be helpful to do as much as you can to rule out external causes and really nail down conceptualising the kinds of things that you are struggling with. With that in mind, HowToAdhd[1] is a great channel with a variety of relatively digestible information.

Burnout could be an issue - if (like me at the moment) you have a lot of workplace-related stress, it's going to make all of this a thousand times harder and lead to worsening symptoms. Youtube Shorts and Instagram are absolutely positively toxic to me (especially without medication) and I avoid them like the plague because they are the _worst_ iteration of attention-stealing, engagement-metric pumping skinner box mechanics yet. It's absolutely critical that we do as much as we can to arrange our environments to encourage positive opportunities. No phones in the bedroom or first thing in the morning - it'll just make you anxious if you check your calendar when you first wake up. Good, consistent sleep is really important. A blackout blind. Stay hydrated.

I am in my thirties and have Cerebral Palsy and an ADHD (predominantly innatentive) diagnosis. It's a very unhelpful name for what is fundamentally thought to be a difference in executive function in the brain. It's not really a deficit of attention, and people hear the hyperactive part and think, "well, I don't bounce off the walls, so I must not have it". It's closer to think of it as impaired control of your executive function, the processes in your mind which prompt you, help you decide to change task, stay on task - to the point where it seriously impairs your daily life.

Getting stuck scrolling on your phone, past the point where you're doing anything meaningful, you're not even enjoying it any more, but you can't really stop, until you realise it's five minutes past 9 and you're late. Finish work. Sitting on the sofa knowing you _should_ get up and do the pots, but you just _can't_. You go get some food. Leaving the fridge open in the kitchen you then go to another room to put something in a drawer. Now your brain doesn't prompt you to go back and close the fridge, but instead you find yourself rabbit-holed into cleaning out a junk drawer. You're finding things you lost in there months ago. Your partner comes home, hours have passed. You forgot about the fridge. And the half-clean kitchen. And the laundry that's sitting wet in the tumble drier. You're surrounded by crap from the drawer.

In my case, people were so focused on the physical problems I had with Cerebral Palsy, and they simply lumped the executive function difficulties I had in with "oh, he is disabled, it's just that", and weren't noticing that multiple constellations of symptoms existed that weren't present in or reasonably explained by it. I'm now also strongly considering the possibility that I may be on the autistic spectrum as well. To be diagnosed with ADHD, it must have been present during your whole life as it's a neurodevelopmental disorder, but it can manifest quite differently as you get through school and the demands of life become greater. You may have done just about okay in school and then (for example) found working life more and more and more difficult as jobs became more and more demanding. Working yourself to the bone out of hours just to "keep up". Multiple burnouts and comorbid depression are not uncommon.

Looking through the replies, there's disagreement and doubt about ADHD, and people can read a list of symptoms and reject it with statements like "but everyone gets distracted or doesn't want to do things sometimes". I'm not saying this isn't ever true - of course there are some people who will try to obtain these medications illicitly. Likewise, our modern world has made all of these attention stealing issues much worse. And yes, if you go to a psychiatrist and have symptoms that fit a consistent pattern from childhood, you can get treatment. But don't be dissuaded by these voices until you've been fully evaluated. Proper assessment isn't something that can be done quickly, so you shouldn't take snap judgements or dismissals as fact either!

If the situation is, you have a history of struggling with behaviours X Y Z, that fits this thing we call ADHD, statistically speaking these medications help more often than not. How some people behave and whether or not what we model as ADHD is accurate or not is irrelevant if the treatments help you, IMHO.

Anyway, it's 2am. I really ought to take my own advice! Feel free to get in touch if you want :)

It's a shame to watch the slow death of yet another service that was making people's lives easier. Can't really say I'm surprised, though. I have to imagine that it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to resist the urge to sell. The key differentiator seems to be whether you get to walk away with your reputation intact among the sort of people who take a hardline stance on this.

Thing is, most of those people probably wouldn't gamble a life-changing sum of money for yourself and the people they love on principles - and ironically, we can't really judge them for it with the world we live in and its incentives.

VC-funded blitzscaling is just the latest meta, and it's no fun for anyone. So much useful potential squandered while everyone has to watch the centralised, closed source, S/PAAS tools they rely on becoming more encumbered, limiting and expensive.

As Tom Toro so famously put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." If people will make that choice when it comes to the land we live on and the air we breathe, you can see why they'd find it a lot easier to do exactly the same thing for some code tearing its way through a lump of silicon.

Shouganai. Someone will just make another Dropbox. The cycle continues.