thonos

Haha of course not

But for example, I picked my next school based on where my elementary school friends went and insisted to my parents that this is where I wanted to be, despite it being a worse choice for my then-grades. And then a few years later again, I picked for my school path to be economics over math (what I actually wanted to do), because my friends picked it.

Or, I was convinced for a while I wanted to work in a hotel post-school for no reason, despite learning programming by myself and being a computer kid writing my own programs and websites. I even applied to hotel-related jobs constantly until my parents pushed me to go to software engineering instead.

So what I mean with 'driven by impulsivity' is that often important decisions aren't handled with reason, but with pure emotion and impulses. Most of the time that's fine when you're young, but there are still times when you want to use logic over impulses.

Sure we can manage without medicine (have done so for 25 years of my life) but constant struggling and arguing with yourself about small things is just not fun.

The difference is if those issues are actually becoming a problem that affects your day-to-day life vs just a mild annoyance. When you can’t get your task at work done because you just really don’t care about it for example. Or when you again throw out your entire salary into this weeks dumb hobby that you are fully convinced isn’t just a phase.

It’s also worth noting that adhd is a spectrum and not a binary condition. Some people have more problems in some things while some other people struggle with something else, or have it very mild.

When I take meds I actually don’t feel any different. It’s just easier to stick to things and in more mentally balanced.

Funny story - I actually found out that I had adhd because I commented on a HN post about my productivity issues and someone suggested that those don’t sound normal. Even just officially knowing what’s wrong helped a lot with managing (even without meds) because I understand where these impulses are coming from for example

> None of you ever want to hear it, but everyone goes through this. It’s the human condition.

Comments like this make me angry because it shows how much of a disconnect there is with taking ADHD serious. It's like saying to a depressed person to "just don't be sad and focus on something fun".

Sure everyone struggles, but imagine those struggles cranked up by 20x. You overthink EVERYTHING, you're driven by random impulses that make you focus on something new and shiny, that make you yourself believe that this is not an impulsive, but this time something worth committing to, just to lose interest 2 weeks later.

Small negative things like someone not replying to your message right away can result in dysphoric episodes without medicine and completely crush your motivation for days.

You drop everything to do dumb things like replying to your comment even though I should be working right now, but I can't not do it, my brain just doesn't let go.

My brain always works in extremes without a middle-setting. Either I'm 100% into something, or I am so not interested that doing mundane things that don't have an immediate urgency feel like having a tooth pulled out and I'd rather do anything else instead. Try translating that to more boring tasks at work and you can see how this becomes a problem.

The list goes on and on and on. Living with ADHD is a nightmare and constant struggle.

If you have resources and time to let your ADHD brain go free it can be fun, but it becomes a struggle when you try to be a working adult with normal job.

I'm not even talking about 'not being able to concentrate' because that's easily fixed with medicine. nowadays But ADHD is so much more involved on the emotional and psychological level.

My childhood was mostly 'driven by impulsivity', so having medicine available to me back then doesn't sound bad.

I too bought those shares with the anticipation that the price will go up due to the hype generated. I made a careful decision to do so by estimating that the traffic on /r/wsb will increase because of the news coverage, which causes people to buy those shares. I don't live in the states and don't use Robinhood, but a local broker that charged me a good bit for US stock trading.

Robinhood halting trading tanked the price in afterhours immediately, and it will likely crash further on opening because of this. As a result, I too will lose money.

Sure that's what you get with market gambling and speculation but I find it ridiculous that this company now singlehandled crashed the stock and results in losses for global independent investors like myself.

Being able to only sell shares and not buy is directly playing towards the hedge funds. It will drive the price down and positions might get closed. If what reddit did was market gambling and manipulation, what robinhood is now doing is the same, just in the opposite direction.

I’m not a parent but I have adhd and working from home is extremely hard for me, much harder than I want to admit. I just can’t concentrate at home and always end up distracted and doing something else.

I can’t for the sake of it focus on work in my apartment.

Yeah that’s a plausible theory

Living in Japan, the handling of the virus has been nothing but disappointing. We entered "state of emergency" but besides schools and a few stores closing nothing has changed. It is less people than before but the trains and buses are still packed, there are lines at the supermarket, even fast food chains (for takeout) and convenient stores, and families now chill outside and meet other families because children are at home. Parks are filled with people and the governments response has consistently only been "please stay at home" which, based on my experience of doing grocery runs, got ignored mostly outside of the major areas like Shibuya/Roppongi. Some business like pachinko parlors flat out ignored the governments requests and the reply to that was "close down or we will publicly announce your name".

People that got sick weren't allowed to take the test unless they fulfilled some checklist someone came up with. People with pneumonia symptoms got turned away at hospital after hospital and instead asked to rest at home which also had an effect on the low number of confirmed cases.

Some articles of people that got confirmed coronavirus but instead of getting quarantined, asked to please not work and self isolate (<- there are also reports of people that were sick for weeks but just continued working with a mask until they were no longer able to). Same for charter flights and people from the cruise. Some people just denied getting tested, so they went home directly.

I have no idea how Japan got away with this but it's true that we are much better off than other countries. The official numbers don't reflect reality a single bit, but I can't argue about the low number of fatalities.

My journey with ADHD has been a mix. I got diagnosed with 25 after someone here on HN pointed out that my motivation issues might not be normal and something worth checking out. Well surprise surprise, they were right and I have ADHD and always had it. Just noone really noticed but in reflection it makes sense now.

At first I was relieved to get meds. Then I started to learn more and more about what ADHD is actually doing to me and my life. I read through dozens of papers and probably know more about it now than my doc who just gives me whatever his book says he should prescribe.

I hate ADHD and I would pay a lot to get rid of it. I hate not being able to focus like a normal person (despite hyper focus bursts) without meds. I hate that my mood is impulsive and all over the place like an emotional hurricane. I am very sensitive to negative feedback (thanks RSD, but also thanks to guanfacine for now being somewhat able to treat this) and can't deal with conflict.

I can't push through with things, my focus and thoughts play ping pong. One moment I obsess with a new hobby and throw a lot of money at it, then a few weeks later I don't bother touching it again. I start a dozen software projects, finish it 80% then lose interest and do something else.

If I have no interest in something I can't do it at all. It's like getting a tooth pulled out. If something grabs m attention I have to drop everything and do it now and if I don't it will bounce back and forth in my head until I do it (like writing this comment).

I procrastinate everything until the last minute. If something doesn't have external consequences I just won't do it. If there is a deadline or it will impact something, I will push it until it's due, then panic and rush through it.

My brain feels like it's always on overdrive and works in extremes without middleground. Either I hate or I love, either I'm interested or not a single bit. Either I'm fully committed on something or I won't touch it at all

But thanks to ADHD I became a very good software engineer. I was able to quickly pick up new technologies and hyper focus through it in no time. I am very good in designing systems because of how fast my brain works. I can quickly sort through heaps of ways to do something and look at things from many different sides at once to find the optimal path (though sometimes overlook things due to gaps in working memory).

Still I hate it. It's also a completely mislabeled condition. If it was just attention I'd be so much happier.

Wow that first paragraph is an explanation I never heard before but nails the concentration part of ADHD

> And beyond that, this simply is a misconception and myth perpetuated by uneducated people. ADHD patients calm down when they take Adderall because they’ve been on it for years and have a tolerance.

Hmm I have to disagree here. Even with my first dosage of Concerta (Methylphenidate) on no tolerance, I started feeling calmer. Like a lot of the chatter in my head got muted and I stopped jumping from thought to thought like a pingpong ball. This experience matches with other friends that have ADHD.

On the other hand when I give them out to friends for trying more often the other person ended up not being able to concentrate due to restlessness or wanting to do a lot of things at the same time (kind causing similar things that it gets rid of for me)

I have adhd too and got my diagnosis when I was 25 because someone here in hackernews pointed out what I was fighting with isn’t normal or just laziness. It was eye opening for me too because all of a sudden a lot of things made sense.

Adhd is absolutely widely misunderstood. It fucks up and affects so many parts of my life, from inhibition, impulsiveness to emotions and motivation. I overthink everything, my mind gets trapped focusing on completely wrong thoughts and don’t even get me started with RSD (Intuniv / guanfacine treats RSD by the way but it’s not available for adults where I live. Look into it!) . The more I myself learn about it, the more I realize how completely mislabeled the name “adhd” for it is.

I agree with you, adhd is hell. I would pay a lot to get rid of it it if I could. Stimulants somewhat help with the focus part but that’s about it. I’m even self experimenting a lot with other medication like MAOIs and antidepressants that have some studies related to adhd done on them them in the hope to find something that works better than my Ritalin.

TSM is another thing that has a 50% success rate in “treating adhd” but it’s not enough evidence for me to shell out this much money.

this was a good read. I am currently myself spiraling down into depression and fighting against it. It's very interesting to try to get a grasp of what's going on and in the past year or so I learned more about brain chemistry, receptors, amines, enzymes, etc than I did during my entire school curriculum.

I call myself a self-proclaimed guineapig: I read a lot of papers, talk with my doc about different attempts of medication and things that I don't want to touch such as SSRIs and why, and self-medicate for things that don't need a prescription or are off-label useful for depression. Some things worked, but aren't sustainable because they aren't prescribable where I live.

Yet after a long time of fighting, the feeling of hopelessness is getting more and more stronger. Depression is horrible and I would give so much to turn back the clock to when I didn't feel the way I do now.