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Comment by thelaxiankey | Hacker News Reader

the thing about being human is you internalize cultural values as your own.

if you lived in a society that valued, i dunno, tracking and hunting down giraffes in small groups, would you have the same struggles? what if just participating in society required ~20 hours of athletic activity a week? i'm not entirely convinced you would have this problem, based on the anthropology i've read.

the signal of a maladaptive culture is not 'i feel like the people around me have a moral failing'. It is 'i, and many others, feel like we've all got basically the same moral failing.'

personally, this has been a very helpful reframing. If I simply can't bring myself to do something, that means not that I am bad and my willpower is bad, it just means that something is materially wrong and I should consider addressing it by doing things that my body will let me do.

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My desire to work on said projects is intrinsic; no one around me expects me to do so. In fact, quite a few of my projects add no value to broader society and exist only because I found doing them interesting. I don't imagine the surrounding culture valuing the hunting of giraffes would particularly affect this one way or the other. (Except if said culture doesn't have computers, I guess.)

> personally, this has been a very helpful reframing. If I simply can't bring myself to do something, that means not that I am bad and my willpower is bad, it just means that something is materially wrong and I should consider addressing it by doing things that my body will let me do.

To be clear, I don't think I'm "bad" or that I have a moral failing just because I can't bring myself to do some things. (If anything, that sounds like an internalization of some unfortunate cultural norms...) In my case, it's a contradiction: I want to do a thing for intrinsic reasons, but I can't bring myself to do the thing due to insufficient motivation/focus (for lack of a better term). It can be maddening at times.

But if we take a more typical example that many ADHD people struggle with like, say, doing the dishes or cleaning the house... I guess I don't really understand what might be "materially wrong" here, or how doing something else addresses whatever that is or, more to the point, actually gets those chores done...? This sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.

> But if we take a more typical example that many ADHD people struggle with like, say, doing the dishes or cleaning the house... I guess I don't really understand what might be "materially wrong" here, or how doing something else addresses whatever that is or, more to the point, actually gets those chores done...? This sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.

We can go a lot more fundamental than this, too. What about brushing your teeth? Showering? Eating? I can keep going.

There are some things you can handwave away as being society's fault, but there are far, far more things that, no matter how much society changes, will still negatively affect me.

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