I hope I can solve this someday. My coping mechanism is to never commit to anything (outside work obligations).
Medication[2] does help me quite a bit, but it's not a silver bullet.
Have you tried Body Doubling[1]? It works wonders for me. The idea is working alongside others, when everyone is doing their own thing. There are online Zoom and Discord groups that facilitate it (look up Discord Study sessions; and also more at [1]).
2 years after my diagnosis (and medication since then), I'm still stuck. I've never had anyone professional to show me how to deal with this other than "here're the pills". I'm currently looking for a therapist.
Most likely, especially that if it's exactly like described in the article it's more like a anxiety and/or long-term-miss-conditioning problem then one caused by a short attention span.
> xanax you lose the anxiety but also you won't care about the thing that's causing anxiety
but I didn't as I was missing the expertise/experience with that.
Just from my understanding anxiety is (often?, sometimes?(1)) a unhealthy over reaction of the same "thing"/"system" which makes you care about thing. I heard about it before that for some people with anxiety disorder and depression, the time they where least anxious was the time they where most depressed, because they simply didn't care about anything anymore.
(1): Anxiety and especially depression are not a very clear cut defined (i.e. not like a broken bone) and can have noticeable different effects on different people, I do not have the expertise to guess in which range this effects can lie for it to still count as depression and/or anxiety.
I’m a fan of this quote from Steve Jobs – (paraphrasing) “every day you wake up and look in the mirror, do you like what you’re doing that day? If not, it’s time to do something else.”
The other quote I like is Jeff Bezos and his “picturing myself on a rocking chair when I’m 80, do I regret not doing this?”
If you can solve these problems then the pills become just a tool to help you execute on the solutions.
Source: Diagnosed with ADHD (because I asked for it - duh, this is the only way), never had a real job but fairly happy with my direction so far. YMMV of course. Be happy with yourself first and foremost and everything else will follow.
You can also set timers/alarms to timebox tasks, and reign in hyper focus - it should be relatively easy to change tasks with the alarm interruption (vs. unmediated, where I find it practically impossible to move to any new task).
In terms of raw productivity, it can definitely make things worse (like the comment I replied to). Or at least, it can replace one problem with another – suddenly your creativity is gone and your hyperfocus is completely misdirected.
Personally I’ve sought out the (re-)diagnosis at times when I felt creativity was less of a priority than execution. If you know exactly what you need to do and can commit to it, the pills can help keep you on track. But they are not the original source of the commitment.
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s worth it, but the dopamine it releases sure does its best to convince me that it is.
I've found that the effects change massively with sleep quality. When I'm short on sleep for a few nights, it almost feels like the medication stops working. It still has an effect—I am noticeably more clumsy and forgetful without it—but it feels different and the higher-order effect on focus or executive function is less pronounced.
Another thing I've heard is that protein in the morning helps. I've tried drinking a protein shake for breakfast and it seems to make the day better in general, but with a much smaller effect than sleep quality. For all I know, it might just have been the case that I only remembered to have breakfast on days when I had slept well...
I was burned out and got into depression because I was going hard on myself for years. Blaming my motivation and asking myself if I even "genuinely want to do the task required to accomplish your[my] goals". Getting my diagnosis was a huge relief. Looking back, I have been motivated beyond everything. I put in at least double the time and effort of everyone else and got not a half out of it than others. Motivation was not the problem and it took me years to realize that. Finally: Actually, I am good enough.
It would depend on the individual.
A lack of focus from ADHD can translate to a lack of motivation due to a lack of progress.
In fact I’d say the clearest indicator of ADHD is a surplus of motivation coupled with a dearth of execution. You know you want it, but you can’t do it, despite being acutely aware of your day-to-day actions fucking it up. This is what medication helps with in my experience.
For anyone wanting to learn more - welcome to my world: https://romankogan.net/adhd/
And these ludicrous notions of needing to provide because you are male and that's your job. Get lost. So the world wants me to perform in a certain way because I was born into it and will judge me harshly if I don't. Take a hike world. But my mind exists in a cage of hardwired pleasure responses and no matter which way you twist and turn you cannot escape the pain of not confirming to them. Get lost world you are too cruel and too stupid to be worth my effort and as a side note, I will not be dictated to by some mindless watchmaker.
In broad terms, taking humanity's current state as a starting point, what would the nearest (aesthetically? existentially?) acceptable point in the human-cultural phase space look like for you?
No intent to antagonize, but I am curious since I have passed through similar worldviews here and there.
Find your people, and you'll see a world worth contributing to.
I subscribe to the view that the notion of a dream job — as opposed to a dream vocation — was created by those you call mindless watchmakers.
That said, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There's a lot of middle ground. Is there place for you there? Not all work is corporate work, after all.
And if not, what would your vocation be?
Is there something you'd see yourself doing if the constraints of the world were not a concern?
If you struggle to answer this, the only thing I can recommend is taking a break from the rat race to heal and find your bearings. Therapy is something that helped me in this process, as therapists are like Stack Overflow for human problems (and, like with SO, it's quite rare to have a problem that nobody has already experienced and found a solution for).
Professional coaches are another resource that can help avoid stepping on the same rake again. It sounds like corporate isn't a good environment for you, and if you are still trying to find what is one, they can help to home in on the next step that would feel fulfilling (and, hopefully, provide income you can live on).
Best of luck, and if you feel isolated, reach out; you can find my info in the profile. Things really don't have to be this way.
Thinking about how I might regret things I haven't done just gives me worse anxiety, not motivation to start doing stuff.
I'm also not sure how you're supposed to "be happy" if you already aren't. Controlling emotional states is not something you can actually directly do rather than trying to affect them indirectly through behaviour and exercises.