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Comment by cottage-cheese | Hacker News Reader

> I think ADHD is the new norm.

Maybe selection bias, but a significant number of my friends are diagnosed.

There may be a little bit of birds of a feather flocking together on this one. Similarly my closest circle have all got a diagnosis of something or other. Most are in the IT field too.

For me personally I mostly attribute this to how the circle initially formed - a bunch of outcasts to varying degrees new to college glomping on to any familiar faces from highschool (despite not really interacting during high school)

Any additions since college were adopted into the group through a mutual "we're the weirdos in this world, aren't we?" initial bond.

or it could be that ADHD is a spectrum with most people having some symptoms of it even if it's not very disruptive.

The better question is how many of the people in these groups have been medically diagnosed?

The groups were already split in my comment. How many emails in your inbox are in your inbox? All of 'em :P

I get the arguments for self-diagnosis but really it's self hypothesis. I only say diagnosed if they're medically diagnosed. Even doctors shouldn't be self diagnosing

ADHD is a spectrum sure but it has a low-end cap due to the second D, disorder. No disorder, no diagnosis, no ADHD. I'd love to have the same brain wiring without the disorder

For myself, I find I mostly can't maintain relationships with other people who don't have ADHD.

It sounds stupid, but I will forget to talk for months and people just drift off, not interested in reconnecting.

But other people with ADHD will reconnect after months as if we'd just been talking yesterday, no bad feelings of being ignored at all.

5% of the population have the disorder. Self selection may be causing you to see it as very prevalent.

I think that may be true.

I also think it's true that many professions will aggressively surface ADHD.

Imagine a plumber making house calls all day. There's a fair bit of structure and variety baked into his day, he's moving around, gets to use his hands, etc. It's hard and skilled work but it also might be really compatible with ADHD.

Now think of a software engineer. 8-10 hours of monofocus on a single task every day. It's just you and the computer... which also has the largest array of distractions (the internet) just a click away. Fucking nightmare scenario for ADHD. If you've got even a hint of ADHD this career will expose it and expose it hard.

I’d say nightmare scenarios would be:

* PA * travel agent * event planner

It's funny because I could see those going either way for ADHD individuals

either nightmare scenarios or dream scenarios

i've actually done some small amount of event planning, an annual event for about 125 people. (i realize that's tiny, obviously people are out there planning events for 100,000 people)

yeah, you're constantly switching your focus back and forth between the 20 things that need to get nailed down in the next 3 months for an upcoming event. and a professional event planner is probably juggling ten small events or several larger ones. it's a juggling act but it's kind of fun. also you have executive freedom to an extent.

engineering is kind of fucked because you are expected to do deep deep deep deep deep big-brain thinking for 2000 hours a year, and yet you are still often bombarded with distractions on a minute to minute basis. absolute MISMATCH.

event planning is chaotic by nature, and hard, and requires context switching, but generally no individual element requires hours of meditative thought and iteration while 3 different managers ping you on fucking Slack and you're also supposed to "keep an eye on production" and also mentor five kids who just graduated from a 6-week code camp like engineering does.

a lot of entrepreneurs are ADHD as hell. the context switching suits them, especially when they are calling the shots.

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