I know that a lot of people struggle a lot with ADHD, and I'm not at all opposed to medication for you and them. My dad struggled to hold down a job for most of my childhood. Had he received his ADHD diagnosis earlier, my early life would have been much more stable. I'm not trying to downplay the degree to which people suffer and their need for help.

However, what you describe feels to me like validation of my point, not a contradiction. Undiagnosed ADHD overwhelmingly becomes manifest in times exactly like what you describe—you were working on a PhD! You were overwhelmed by Excel. You hated repetitive tasks. COVID lockdowns were impossible for you.

The depression and anxiety associated with ADHD are not inherent to the ADHD traits, they're the result of feeling incapable to cope with the modern world. All of the things that you described as overwhelming are accidental complexity that we can and should get rid of. Being a great researcher shouldn't require all of the overhead that we impose on modern PhD candidates. Just living in the modern world shouldn't require all that overwhelming bookkeeping—as just one example, taxes and bills can be and should be mostly automated, but they're not. If you didn't have to keep track of a million tiny things in your life, would you have been anxious and depressed?

Again, in the present reality medication is hugely important for a lot of people like you. But that doesn't mean that the world shouldn't also change to not require keeping track of so many things that add so little value.