> It's as if ADHD is a manufactured diagnosis to pathologize a healthy response to living conditions humans should find intolerable: sitting at a desk all day. I won't link to Born to Run, but it's easy to see that pre-industrial humans (i.e. 99% of the homo sapiens lifestyle) had lives full of physical activity. We call exercise "self-medication" when it is really a sick society that we should address.
I'd love for this to be true but all the evidence we have is that it is not true. I don't know if you're diagnosed with ADHD yourself or not, but as someone diagnosed with ADHD this sounds like a cool fantasy. I've also heard people say "well it's just cellphones and TikTok giving everyone ADHD, people just need to practice focusing". I grew up playing ~3 sports at any one time year round, with plenty of outdoor physical activity, running around the neighbourhood. I read books constantly, had very little access to computers, no access to cellphones. I also had terrible ADHD symptoms my whole life, and the only thing that helps reduce the symptoms effectively is medication. I have plenty of coping mechanisms that help but they are not preventative.
I would love not to take medication, as I'm generally averse to taking medication unnecessarily. It's the only thing that lets me choose to work on the things I want to work on, whether chores, listening to people, projects at my job or in my personal life.
The scientific evidence we have about ADHD is that it's highly heritable, that there are clear physical differences in size of certain parts of the brain in people with diagnosed ADHD, and that some children grow out of it as those parts of their brain catch up. It's one of the best examples we have of a disorder with clear physical causes, and the mechanism of the medications we have is also one of the best understood of all brain disorders. It's a dream to suggest it is just some hunter-mode human capability that modern society doesn't have a place for.
It sucks to have it and I wish I didn't, and that's because I want to be able to pay attention to the people I love when they talk to me, not because of some desire to be a perfect cog in a corporation that wouldn't exist in pre-industrial society.