Comment by hnews_account_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnews_account_1 | Hacker News Reader

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hnews_account_1

This is so true. My friend got a ADHD diagnosis very late in life and it became so much of his fucking identity. Thankfully, he was smart enough to know the dangers of abusing adderall so he took it in moderation. But he refused to listen to my assessment that it was not helping him at all.

The worst part of it was that he was convinced that his academic failures in life were due to his ADHD. Now we are both successful people in general. He's a software engineer in a major company. But since he couldn't figure out some simple math shit that was obvious to me, he thought he was being handicapped by his disorder. He refused to listen to my claim that everyone has a lot of stuff in math they just do by the rules they were taught and only realize later in life that there's an underlying concept. It is kinda the point of our education system because our young brains take more time to grasp the basics so we cram the rules and wait for the rest of cognition to catch up before teaching the basics.

He stopped taking the meds a while ago when he realized it wasn't doing him much good and realized that there's a limit to how smart people get and it is ok to not be born as next Terry Tao or something.

> He refused to listen to my claim that everyone has a lot of stuff in math they just do by the rules they were taught and only realize later in life that there's an underlying concept.

You're probably misinterpreting "refusal" as "unable". After a lifetime of being told "if you would just apply yourself...", you start to get a distorted impression on what the average experience is. Obviously, he's just coming to understand something that everyone else had appreciated since they first learned it, because they applied themselves.

Maybe I'm projecting -- I'm in a similar spot, but I've been diagnosed since high school, and it wasn't exactly a shocker then.

What you're describing really sounds like the secondary depression[0] that usually comes with adhd. That is, he's probably is being handicapped by the disorder -- it can be a real slog to read math, and very hard to practice it, even when it's interesting. But it sounds like you were coming face to face with depression caused by a lifetime of not feeling good enough. Frustration that you can't apply yourself harder. Being gaslit into believing that you weren't trying.

I have the same issues with being told to apply myself. It's a common story for people in the 95-99th percentile regardless of whether or not there is an ailment holding them back. I am not trying to reduce what people are going through, but I just think this is not the point of variation. Maybe experiences around not being able to earn money at work due to concentration issues are a bigger differentiator (I don't know).

But I understand why people have an achilles heel about certain aspects of their life that they have been scolded about constantly. I have those issues too but in certain areas I overcame them entirely like in academics.

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