ADHD is a debilitating neurological disorder, not a mild inconvenience.
Believe me, I wish that just drinking coffee and "trying harder" was a solution. I started medication because I spent two decades actively trying every other possible solution.
> what would you recommend if one is against the idea of medication in general for neurological issues that aren't deterental to ones life?
If your neurological issues aren't impacting your life negatively, they aren't neurological issues. I don't know what else to say to this. Of course you shouldn't treat non-disorders with medication.
> do you feel the difference between being medicated and (strong?) coffee?
These do not exist in the same universe. It's not remotely comparable.
> have you felt the effects weaken over time?
Only initially, after the first few days. It stabilizes pretty well after that.
> if you did drink coffee, have you noticed a difference between the medication effects weakening on the same scale as caffeine?
Again, not even in the same universe. Also, each medication has different effects in terms of how it wears off at the end of the day. For some it's a pretty sudden crash, for others it tapers, and some are mostly designed to keep you at a long term level above baseline (lower peaks, but higher valleys).
> is making life easier with medication worth the cost over just dealing with it by naturally by adapting to it over time (if even possible in your case)?
If I could have solved the biological issue "naturally" I would have. ADHD comes with really pernicious effects that makes adaptation very challenging.
this is very interesting since I also know people who have been diagnosed with adhd and in manifests in completely different ways that's why I like to ask these questions, there are currently 6 known types of ADHD the latest one being inattentive ADHD.
thanks for sharing, the coffee part is mostly for the claim that it has the opposite effect on people with ADHD or no effect at all.
It's very presence in the list is already a drain on my attention that I didn't ask for and do not want. The fact that it requires any action on my part to remove it from the queue is an issue in and of itself.
For mojuba and myself, email is a way to organize TODO items. Things to take care of exist either way, and email is an awesome way to keep track of, and process, events / tasks asynchronously.
shermantanktop and you, forbiddenvoid, seem to refuse organizing TODOs, or perhaps even the concept that external events be allowed to generate TODOs for you ("my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to"). I closely know this -- i.e., "garbage dump with tire fires in it" -- because that's precisely what my SO's mailbox looks like. Whereas I've maintained a perfect inbox 0 for several decades, both at work and privately.
This is an unbridgeable psychological divide between two attitudes toward, or even two definitions of, tasks and obligations. People who can naturally implement inbox 0 never lose track of a task (not just in email, but in any other medium either), and get indignated when they receive reminders. They're excellent schedulers, and orderly, but also frequently obsessive-compulsive, neurotic. People who can't instinctively do inbox 0 cannot be taught or forced to do it, they tend to need repeated reminders, and may still forget tasks. At the same time, they have different virtues; they tend to shine with ill-defined problems and unexpected events.
Neither group is at fault; the difference has biological roots, in the nervous system. Our brains physically differ.
I kind of agree, but I explain it differently. Everyone’s job is a mix of reactive and proactive work. For my particular job, reactive work is necessary but will expand to fill all my time and then some. Proactive work is ambiguous and uncertain, but usually ends up being the highest value work that I do.
If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.
That's a super interesting situation (and description).
I always order reviewing the work of others ahead of working on my own code. This works wonders for the team. But admittedly, if the review workload is not distributed well, then my approach produces an annoying imbalance for me, and over the longer term, it leads to burnout.
Put differently, if I enable / assist / mentor others, that produces value comparable to my own personal output, for the company (or that's at least how I understand things). However, the emotional value of each, to me, is comparable only up to a certain extent -- namely, as long as I get to write enough code myself. The proportion must be right.
I rely on management / the team to (self-)organize the review workload, and then I prefer to help others first, and work on my own stuff second. I draw much more satisfaction from working on my own code, but I feel the importance of supporting others, so I prioritize the latter. This particular prioritization too rewards me emotionally, but only up to a certain point. I can say "no", but, in my view, if I have to say "no" frequently, to requests for assistance, then the workload is ill-distributed, and that responsibility is not mine. (I explicitly don't want to be promoted to a level where I become responsible for assigning tasks to people.)
I’m in a senior position and just coming off a year where I intentionally focused on enabling others and making the collective group more effective. That meant more reactive (and less visible) work.
I got feedback that my contributions weren’t tangible and visible enough. I switched gears back to my previous mode (more proactive work) and all is well again.
Different work cultures treat this differently. At another company my enabling activities would have been valued more. But I do think being the glue in a group is usually undervalued.
In the long run, this makes for very interesting rhetorical analysis of the work.
Your example of Braveheart, for instance, involves two views of the past through the lens of the _present_. So even in that context, both of those views are tinted by the experience and environment of the observer.
I hope so. Random accusations of "this feels like AI" don't add anything to the conversation and are genuinely harmful to those accused when there is no AI involved.
AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.
I would consider it more of a necessary evil than a flaw. Both the writer and the audience need to be able to connect with the story, and you're just going to have a better connection if it feels more familiar to you.
It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat things quite so often.
I doubt a human would use it repetitively, even if it is common. This was most likely written paragraph-by-paragraph by AI, causing the repetition, if I had to guess.
I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.
Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.
Well, I had to write it down, but I have to write down everything these days. But from the way the problem was phrased, it was obvious you don;t have to actually find to numbers.
ADHD is a debilitating neurological disorder, not a mild inconvenience.
Believe me, I wish that just drinking coffee and "trying harder" was a solution. I started medication because I spent two decades actively trying every other possible solution.
> what would you recommend if one is against the idea of medication in general for neurological issues that aren't deterental to ones life?
If your neurological issues aren't impacting your life negatively, they aren't neurological issues. I don't know what else to say to this. Of course you shouldn't treat non-disorders with medication.
> do you feel the difference between being medicated and (strong?) coffee?
These do not exist in the same universe. It's not remotely comparable.
> have you felt the effects weaken over time?
Only initially, after the first few days. It stabilizes pretty well after that.
> if you did drink coffee, have you noticed a difference between the medication effects weakening on the same scale as caffeine?
Again, not even in the same universe. Also, each medication has different effects in terms of how it wears off at the end of the day. For some it's a pretty sudden crash, for others it tapers, and some are mostly designed to keep you at a long term level above baseline (lower peaks, but higher valleys).
> is making life easier with medication worth the cost over just dealing with it by naturally by adapting to it over time (if even possible in your case)?
If I could have solved the biological issue "naturally" I would have. ADHD comes with really pernicious effects that makes adaptation very challenging.