Excuse my ignorance, but what is the line between ADHD and interest/geekery in the scenario you outlined above?
I imagine most of the HN readership could spend hours on something they love, and struggle to engage as deeply with many or most of the tasks that are required of them at work. But ADHD would not be the diagnosis for most people. Just boredom. What tips the experience over the line?
I’ll speak personally, I don’t know how other people experience ADHD, but I don’t just get “bored,” I have a crippling and anxiety inducing inability to do something. I REALLY want to do it, but I just, can’t? Like I physically can’t get up or walk over and do it, even though I know I have to and I even want to.
It really is a motivation problem, I have a strong desire to do it but I just… can’t?
An extremely, miserably stressful and depressing experience I have been through countless times! I’ve gotten somewhat better about it over the months and years (especially as its impact becomes more of a problem) but now I tend to channel it more into bikeshedding and perfectionistic tweaking....
Not diagnosed and got a high functioning score on an ADHD test so I may or may not have as bad of a problem as others. On the other hand, I failed out of college twice. it’s not great.
For lack of a better metaphor, imagine you have a job where you have to drink three cups of water per day. Seems pretty easy right, since it's just water. Most people can just drink it casually with no problem. It's just flavorless water.
Now imagine your tastebuds are different. Two of those three cups of water taste putrid, while one cup of water is delicious (like soda, tea or whatever your favorite beverage of choice is). Every day you're going to start with the best cup of water, and then struggle with the rest. Sometimes even all three taste putrid and you can't figure out why.
What medication did is that now they all consistently taste like water at minimum. Sometimes one cup is still better than the rest, but the others don't taste actively bad.
A hyper-fixation session feels closer to how people describe addiction than I’d like to admit.
When unmedicated, I can easily find myself diving down the rabbit hole for 12-14 hours straight, working on interesting but unimportant tasks.
You forget about any concept of time. You feel hunger but can’t pull yourself away to eat lunch or dinner. Daily goals are forgotten. You only stop when your body literally forces you.
To be completely fair it might not be exclusively ADHD.
Research is discovering that Autism and ADHD are both on the "same" spectrum, and ASD covers both. Meaning they are not necessarily separate things.
My ability to do bullshit work, is practically zero. If it isn't a task that I find challenging/interesting/important then there is negative motivation (or tolerance) to do that thing. I can and will find something else to do, forever putting off the BigBoringTask. Sometimes I can fool myself, and sometimes I work the fix into the project.
Example: I _HATE_ filling out timesheets. If the company wants anything more specific then "clock in/clock out"; too bad.
So, one place I worked I wrote up a bunch of script to scrape SSH logs to catch my login/logout, and would then calculate the "time spent on client". I also had it search emails based on that day and would pull the ticket number most likely related to why I was SSHing in. This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.
I love the fixing/solving, challenge/reward; I can't stand the tedium. And I just don't do it if I can't stand it.
I have had a clinical diagnosis for both ADHD & ASD. So it's no longer a mystery why I act/react the way I do. It also takes away the sting when somebody says "Everybody else has to do this, why is it so hard for you?"
> This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.
Yep. Occasionally I have to stop and remind myself that all I'm trying to do is rename 10 files (for example), and by the time I remember the {ba,z}sh-ism for parameter substitution, I could have probably manually renamed them. I usually tell myself that it's not nearly as fun, though.
This does occasionally present detrimental facets, though. I have a homelab, and as most people with one, its primary purpose is storing and serving media files (I promise I do other things too, but let's be honest – Plex is what people care about). I run apps in K3OS, which has been dead for quite some time. The NAS is in a VM under Proxmox, and I build images with Packer + Ansible. I've been wanting to shift K3OS over to Talos [1] for some time, but I had convinced myself that it was only worthwhile if all of it was in IaC, starting from PXE. I got most of the way there, and then stopped due to work taking more of my life than I wanted. Unfortunately, around this time the NAS broke (as in a hardware failure, not a software issue), and I was refusing to bring it back until the entire homelab was up to my absurd self-imposed standards. Eventually I convinced myself this was a ridiculous punishment, replaced the dead hardware, and brought it back.
I imagine most of the HN readership could spend hours on something they love, and struggle to engage as deeply with many or most of the tasks that are required of them at work. But ADHD would not be the diagnosis for most people. Just boredom. What tips the experience over the line?