[spiffytech]

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child in the early 90s, before smartphones and PCs and all of this "overstimulation". My family has some home videos of school plays where the difference between my behavior and my classmates' is striking - a categorically different level of hyperactity and inattention. I spent a lot of my childhood working around energy and inattention issues. In adulthood the symptoms subdued and got more subtle, harder to spot, but once I knew what to look for, I still checked all the boxes and it can still cause me problems.

ADHD is very real, but just because someone struggles to focus or plan doesn't mean ADHD is the explanation. ADHD's impact is wide-ranging and nuanced, with possible symptoms like "emotional impermanence" (you forget or disbelieve how someone feels about you if they haven't told you very recently), or having "time blindness" (a poor sense of time, where it's hard to process anything more nuanced than "now" and "not now"). And ADHD doesn't always mean you outright "can't" function normally; sometimes you can but it'll just much more draining than for a normal person.

Here's an article I found fascinating about how ADHD brains behave differently at a physical level: https://www.additudemag.com/current-research-on-adhd-breakdo...

The Translating ADHD podcast is pretty good at discussing the lifestyle impact side of ADHD. That's an angle that neurodiversity research literature broadly doesn't cover much.