Hallowell and Ratey, who write about ADHD, suggested a new entity for the current world: VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait. It is like ADHD but it is culturally induced and not presumed to be due to an innate deficiency in executive function.
"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....
"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."
It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.
Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.
This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia:
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
> The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
Or they will be, and we will have an even bigger problem..
Please also note that ADHD-like symptoms can present from sleep Apnea/UARS-induced sleep deprivation and the probability of having Apnea/UARS rises with age. Smoothly for men and a with a sudden jump after menopause for women.
So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.
I recently went through this. I was diagnosed with ADHD 15 years ago and have been managing it, but over the last 2-3 years I had been experiencing increased levels of brain fog, fatigue, and by ability to focus had deteriorated to the point I wasn't sure if I would be able to continue working. I had a sleep study done 10 years ago that only found Night Terror Disorder, but no signs of sleep apnea. I did another sleep study about 6 months ago and it turns out while I wasn't having apnea events I had constant and persistent hypopnea. Started using a CPAP and it feels like I've been given a second lease on life. FWIW, I am a very active and in shape individual within a healthy weight range. Don't wait to get tested if you have even the slightest worry you may have it.
What machine and mask do you have? I had a bad CPAP experience 2017ish and navigating sleep apnea treatment with ADHD kinda sucks. I got a recent sleep study done, but the doctor's office seems like a sales farm for a specific CPAP brand/model and they aggressively steered me away from an oral appliance.
I was prescribed modafinil earlier this year and it worked well when I took it but it was intense at the useful dose so the doctor put in for a sleep study. It was a 3 month wait but I am finally getting it done next week an I'm hopeful it leads to a conclusive diagnosis.
I also noticed my issues were worse after my 3rd bout of covid :-/ I had very high sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine after the 2nd bout and have largely cut both out of my life (I never drank more than 20 drinks / year in my life anyway).
Doesn't even need to be a CPAP. I had a sleep study done and it said I basically only had sleep apnea when lying on my back, and my doctor suggested a dental appliance to pull my lower jaw forward.
I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.
One of the many reasons why we should air drop GLP-1 over the entire country, like condoms in Bangladesh!
No thanks, don’t need it, don’t want it!
The satiation effect that GLP-1s cause also affects motivational drive. I've noticed my ability to get work done is hampered when I am at higher doses of my ozempic.
> I've noticed my ability to get work done is hampered when I am at higher doses of my ozempic.
You should be using LLM agents anyway. It's the solution to every problem.
Can I have LLMs replace my GLP-1?
Yes. LLMs are the new zombo.com. You can do anything with LLMs. Anything at all.
The only limit is yourself.
Please, no. GLP1s leave you worse off than when you started if you stop taking them. Weight is also not necessarily the factor that leads to sleep apnea; I got diagnosed while having a healthy weight in my 30s.
>Please, no. GLP1s leave you worse off than when you started if you stop taking them.
This doesn't seem factual, or at the very least, not that simple?
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/two-years-after-stoppi...
Not the OP, but there was a lot of talk that glp1 had a negative effect on bone density and in older people it was especially problematic.
There is evidence that is not the case though https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8878541/
Something I'd picked up somewhere a decade or two ago was losing weight too fast can cause problems with bone and muscle density. So it could be related but not a direct effect.
I think they were referring to rebound weight though, something else I'd heard about these drugs that also doesn't affect everyone. A scarier one was one person whose weight got too low so they stopped taking it, but for some reason had a lot of trouble gaining any weight and getting up to a healthy level.
The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands. During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions like I imagine ADHD might feel like.
During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.
> like I imagine ADHD might feel like.
Definitely feels like that, with the exception of task initiation. I am capable of deep focus work, but I can't control when (or where). I can block out time on my calendar all I want, if my brain says "Nope, we're not doing work today" then I'm not doing work, interruptions or not.
It becomes a real disability in the workplace when everything is defined by more or less rigid schedules and your mode of operating is not a schedule but "whenever my brain says so." Some days that might be 7am, other days its 1am, and sometimes it's an entire week or two of not being able to get jack done and then staying up all night and getting 15 business hours worth of work done at once because you physically can't pull yourself away.
I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on.
Yes, I've found it to be completely incompatible with managers and the corporate world.
I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff whenever I felt the urge to do so.
In corporate jobs I just have to lie and describe smooth and steady daily progress while actually working in sudden fits and starts, but it's hard to maintain the lie.
> I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on
Yeah, ADHD is very poorly named unfortunately. It really is not an attention disorder, it's an executive function disorder
I always joke that what I am interested in doing and when it is accomplished (if ever) comes down to when the Holy Spirit deigns to work through me lol
I’ve got a few dozen quarter finished projects still waiting in line…
> During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions
This is normal for any "knowledge" employee or professional, or basically any job that is not strictly defined as doing one or a small number of fixed tasks such as on an assembly line.
> The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands
This is actually something that is pretty misunderstood about ADHD.
People with ADHD don't actually struggle with attention. They struggle with executive function, because their brains don't produce/consume/manage dopamine correctly
Somewhat ironically, Hyperfocus is also a symptom of ADHD. When ADHD people are doing something that is rewarding (producing dopamine) to their brains they might be really hard to pull away from it. It's really common for ADHD people to be able to sit and play videogames for hours on end, because it is giving them dopamine. Ask them to sit and do spreadsheets and they can't sit still and they look "attention deficit". But attention isn't a problem when they're engaged with the work!
I have ADHD, and I really enjoy coding and building stuff. I can't sit still for more than two seconds when I try to use LLMs to build software though. I need to be more hands on than that. Same goal, same process, different execution, completely different experience for me. I don't feel accomplished or rewarded when the LLM writes a function for me compared to writing it myself.
As a fellow ADHD.. increase your threads... while the agent is working on one thing, prompt another thread to work on another project. Keep a bunch of them in the air at one time. But make sure you are still interested in what you are building. If you don't think what you are building is important coding agent or not it's going to be very hard to do that thing.
If somebody told me 25 years ago that in the future we all would have a TV on our office desk with 100 channels I would not have believed them. Yet ... the current situation is worse! Thinking of it in terms of mental disorders, I don't think that is going to help much.
The current situation was foretold 20 years ago in the prescient documentary named Idiocracy.
I’d argue Idiocracy is actually quite the opposite of what the OP was talking about. It has a mildly eugenics-y vibe where the world is bad because poor, stupid people have poor, stupid kids that outnumber the smart ones.
OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
Isn't is well-known that higher education correlates with lower birthrates? At the very least college years are prime child-rearing years.
> Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3449224/
Yeah, Idiocracy isn't wrong on the facts about our current day scenario. The issue is where it takes that: poor, lower educated people will inevitably have poor, lowered educated children who will in fact get less and less educated as time goes on, and they will take over, leading to... idiocracy.
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
You could also look at it as a metaphor for the continued debasement of american public life and mass media. Or an excuse to make lots of dick jokes.
If it's even a little bit genetic, the idiocracy effect still holds up
I always saw the mechanism being that Clevon created more offspring without instilling good memes.
The number one goal in a functioning democracy should be to have the highest possible education rate.
Number one? Highest?
I disagree with the extremes.
Why wouldn't self defense be number one, in many cases/times?
Why wouldn't we simply stop spending on education at break even ROI? (to be clear that's not the same as the education creates a salary bump equal to the tuition ... there are Nth order effects of education that should be priced into my point)
Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
>less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people
Yes, they obviously are? Just an absurd thing to state.
Education is not a proxy for intelligence. There are plenty of smart people who don’t have formal education (including many in this forum).
Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.
I agree that the overall premise is somewhat eugenics-y, but I overlook that on the basis that it's a comedy movie from 2005 and it's easier to swallow than something like "aliens abducted all the world's smart people"[0] or something. There are still some good themes on over-reliance on automation without understanding it.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lllrpcd8vbk
Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
Honestly, as fun as the film is I’ve noticed people very rarely mention that disturbing premise.
Yeah I don't hate the movie by any means I just think it isn't as deep as people often credit it as being.
…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.
The point of the commentary isn't cryofreezing or the eugenics/handwaved-backstory. Those are a few minute intro just creating the setting and don't make sense nor do they have anything to do with the rest of the plot.
The fun in idiocy is the "isnt this dumb!" take on a bunch of society that is one big dumb step worse than current life but certainly recognizable.
Everything turned into advertising. Costco expanding into everything. Brainless tv and the related celebrities (that people love for the gimmick but don't give a shit about as people). Health care that only supports a diagnosis by matching to a few kid-friendly tiles. Politics as professional wrestling, nepotism, incompetence, and overpromising. For a related laugh, go look at one of the online quizzes from 2016 about "which of these ten quotes are from a real presidential candidate and which are from president comacho".
Idiocracy is a fun, silly satire that is nearly a cartoon, from a bunch of folks who made a bunch of successful social commentary cartoons. It very much isn't a eugenics story - if Mike judge were actually writing that as the intent I think it would be dark and with a vicious ruling class.
It would be interesting to remake it, replacing the premise that people are genetically stupid with just the idea that they're habitually stupid from generations of reliance on AI and social media.
An with proper view on the management. You see, Idiocracy is too optimistic, because their leader genuinely tried to solve a global problem, which is already unbelievable today. Moreover, when their plan didn't work, they really listened to their experts and changed their mind. It's too good.
Wall-e!
There is an even darker, older story with a similar premise. And it also has undertones of today with the billionaires' promise of space colonization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
I would add that Brazil (1985) foretold this 41 years ago.
The civil servants are addicted to their personal TV and only pause watching it compulsively when the boss comes around. As soon as the boss is out of sight they resume their fixation.
From memory it is a loop of a cowboy galloping on a horse.
Idiocracy is downright optimistic compared to our current society.
Citizens have one single piece of identification, and it's not even electronic. Their location is only tracked when discrete scanners manage to see that identification. Medical care is provided promptly. Joe Bowers's court case wasn't decided by political meddling, and the two minute hates were only focused on him after he was found guilty. There are security holes in the implementation of the prison that allow intelligent individuals to escape the machine. The president has leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism. Starbucks seems like respectable open employment for adults rather than children being trafficked to some island in secret. Joe Bower's aptitude was eventually recognized and appreciated - the society wants to get better.
Like all sci-fi, Idiocracy was largely a reflection of the society it was written in. A society that had values we've long since given up on.
Their leader tried to solve a global problem, not calling it a hoax. When their plan didn't work, they really listened to experts, whatever they had, and changed approach. Too optimistic even for modern times I would say.
https://xkcd.com/603/
Sure, my last sentence was a bit of a broad brush. But anything more substantive that focuses on direct sources of rot usually attracts partisans who don't like the messages.
We are “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.
Thanks for the reminder to read this.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Removed that line just before commenting :)
It's incidentally one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox.
"Alien species may isolate themselves in virtual worlds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
Yes, VAST is specifically not ADHD, although a disorder is really defined by how it affects you. For example, some people worry too much, other people have generalized anxiety disorder, and the effect it has on your life is what separates normal from disordered.
"The person finds it difficult to control the worry.... The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." DSM-IV/V
Some of the strategies used to help people with ADHD are used to help with VAST-related loss of focus and procrastination, but medication is probably not recommended for those diagnosed as not having ADHD but likely having VAST.
It's funny, I googled VAST and the AI search insisting that it's the same as ADHD, it's just a reframing of it
It sounds similar but almost coming at it from the opposite angle. ADHD is when your brain's baseline is not producing or using dopamine properly. VAST almost sounds like a sort of burnout, where your brain is overwhelmed and cannot process stuff anymore. The symptoms are the same, the effects are the same, but the cause is different.
ADHD root cause is internal lack of stimulation, VAST root cause is external overwhelming stimulation. That's how I understand things anyways
I would have believed them, my tv at home had more than 100 channels at the time, and I think we all knew back then that usable video streaming was coming sooner or later.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD and it continued into adulthood. The only way to suppress it is a diet of raw veggies fruits and meats, combined with like 3 hours of exercise a day and time in nature with silence which my evolutionary ancestors presumably did to survive. The way to make it worse is the combination of sugars, processed foods and flashing stimulus.
Point is I think MOST mental illness is the modern world. If you dumped people with severe depression into their ancestors supposedly worse lives 6,0000 years ago, hunting with tribe and sleeping under starry sky, they’d be fine.
I think placebo is a very strong effect most people underestimate.
> there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition
This is an interesting way to try to put a label on someone’s behavioral conditioning. One of the common, and growing, problems with Internet discussions of ADHD is that they’ve expanded so much that most young people growing up in a connected world can identity with some influencer’s description of ADHD. Working with young, tech-interested students is worrying right now because across every group you will find most of them saying some variation of believing that they have ADHD. Their basis is usually a combination of Reddit posts and something from a streamer or content creator they follow.
Yet most of them don’t have anything resembling focus or executive function problems. I think those with ADHD diagnoses from youth just don’t talk about it much. It’s the people who discovered it on social media who are bringing it up the most in this context. The basis for their belief that they have ADHD is more about feeling that self-discipline is easy and enjoyable for “normies” and the fact that they have to put in some effort to study and keep their room clean instead of watching YouTube and playing video games is indicative of a condition.
The old way of trying to draw a line between people who are neurodivergent and neurotypical doesn’t really work on those who came up reading those terms on the internet. For various reasons, the majority of them have come to view themselves as neurodivergent in some way, even when they clearly don’t meet any intended definition of that word. In the teenage years it has almost become an extension of the youthful belief that nobody understands you because you’re different and you see the world uniquely. Along come all of the TikTok creators to explain that these feelings are abnormal and come with all these labels you should apply to yourself. Now they believe that they are neurodivergent and start collecting self-diagnoses.
Having a different set of labels could be an interesting way to try to change this dynamic. Instead of one label that’s supposed to represent the entire spectrum from people who cannot function in normal life to the guy who is getting As in all of his classes but feels like studying isn’t as easy as it should be, it might be time to offer some labels for the lighter end of the spectrum so we can get back to using the heavy medical diagnoses to mean something significant.
There’s an entire other conversation about how the dilution of diagnoses like ADHD is causing harm to those with serious ADHD because the term doesn’t mean as much any more. Extra labels for mimic conditions or behavioral/personality variants could be a good way to relieve some of that pressure.
Informative comment, thank you.
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
ADHD has a clinical definition that needs to be diagnosed by a clinical professional.
ADHD usually runs in families. There will likely be a direct relative who went undiagnosed, but who fits the ADHD criteria. Also symptoms from early childhood onwards - it's not something that just happens one day. It's a lifelong pattern of behaviour.
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.
Not OP, but I would say that people's self analysis should focus around examining/describing their own internal existence, not external-view terms from the medical industry. If you suspect you have a problem that can be diagnosed and helped by the medical industry, go right ahead and seek out that help. But regardless you've also got to do the work internally, and externalizing your locus of control onto the medical industry undermines that.
Amazingly well said. I have nothing substantive to add but thank you for writing that
That could be me, I don't think I have ADHD but I might have some tendencies that were developed after I moved to the US in my teens. The culture was different, fast moving, and very hectic. My 20s were hell because I couldn't figure it all out. Not much changed since then.
...as I sit here reading the experienced/insightful/funny posts on hacker news instead of working on more pressing matters.