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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

To steal an old meme: Men will literally come up with new "syndromes" instead of going to therapy.

GAS/GFS sounds like a regular Tuesday on ADHD. I want to play a racing sim. Better learn intricate details of electronics, physics and car mechanics so I can build my own brake pedal. Is the brake pedal working? No. Have I spent even a single minute playing a racing sim since starting this project? Also no. But I have taught myself how to build my own 3D printer from scratch and I also never will do that ever again.

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I have ADHD and it is bothering me to no end that when people ask me what my hobby is, I find out I have a huge list of half-finished stuff instead.

For example I like blacksmithing. Built a simple sword just grinding the metal, then decided to study how to get a proper forge and whatnot. Studied a lot, learning the chemistry of steel, found where to buy the stuff. Never bought it, never made any forged item.

Then I decided to go for armor making, using rings. Started making one, got stuck because the rings were too rigid and I wasn't strong enough... and that is it, it ended there.

So music then? Spent years learning how to compose music with a teacher that actually taught famous musicians, made my own cables to attach a keyboard to my computer, bought software, learned how to use trackers, became "friends" (as in... I don't talk much to them, but when I do they actually listen and give me small favors) Siren (musician from Unreal series) and Virt (musician from a lot of newer indie games, like Shovel Knight). How much music I made? 0. People at the church asked me if I can play my keyboard in public while people sing hymns. I replied I actually, never tried that.

Dumped a ton of money in magic the gathering cards. Made a point when moving country, of bringing them with me, half of my airplane baggage limit was MTG cards. Last time I played? Several months ago, almost a year I suppose.

The list keeps going and it is driving me nuts, I feel like I am wasting my life. I am not studying hard enough to improve my job performance, I am not studying the bible as I should either, I keep promising myself I will do it and then I don't. And again keeping with the theme of GAS, I actually spent a lot of money buying access to theology online classes and seminars, and didn't watch any of it.

> as I should

You shouldn't do anything. It's your life and you live it like you want. All morals, shoulds and shouldn'ts and musts and mustn'ts are a pile of horseshit. You are only responsible to yourself and you are going to be the person judging yourself in the end. When somebody tells you you should go to church, it's about the same importance as if they asked you to play CoD with them.

And if you are bothered that you did not finish something... circle back to it. You have decades of life to purse your happiness. Relax, enjoy the detour and circle back with more knowledge and savings.

I have no ADHD but my wife, I know.., keeps me in check in ways I was unable to myself.

It's not that she hates what I'm doing or nags about it, it's just that she'll ask the hard questions. The ones I avoid like the plague.

"What are you going to use it for? .. Ok, cool, so how long will you need? .. So, have you been making progress? Why not? Why are doing something else and wasting time while there is still work to do? .. You are switching around a lot and it seems you are avoiding finishing what you started.. Have you considered therapy?" At this point I'm like, damn girl, you're right. What am I doing.

After a while I learned to ask myself those questions and get some discipline into my (hobby) life.

When you get bored, continue working on some of the half finished stuff.

I have a project that I worked on for a few months, then one and a half years later I worked on it during a national holiday, noticed a pretty big flaw, threw 25% of the code out to rewrite it and then suddenly it was usable!

Anything that is half-finished is also half-done!

My brother has a pretty intense case of ADHD and is nothing like this. Some of my in-laws too and they also have no problems with weird hobbies and collecting random stuff. They certainly are no "makers".

They do have trouble holding down jobs and not hyper-focusing on their leaky faucets for two weeks straight without eating or sleeping much and talking about it non-stop while somehow not fixing it.

Yet, myself, no ADHD in sight. Other things, sure, but no ADHD and I have a knack of disappearing into black holes and emerging with "stuff"/"knowledge". I dislike synth music, but have programmed a modular software synth because I wanted to know how it works. Never touched it again. I know it now, there is no pay off in using it. That's boring and I'm no musician.

I'm not completely convinced this is an "ADHD" thing. I think this is a personality thing. INTP or something like that? You are just a "tinkerer". Getting stuff done is boring. Learning how stuff works is where the fun is at.

For me a large part of that is writing software and then libraries for that software, and so on. I've been trying (with partial success) to have one large project and inbetween do small tools etc that can be finished in a weekend. Also helps to have a todo list for even the smallest stuff in the main project so that it's easy to start picking up where I left off even if it's been a while.

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