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noodling over a reframing of ADHD. “attention deficit” is a terrible name i think; the way i experience it is more like my sense of what’s important at any given moment is unstable, jostled around by input. sometimes there’s an emergency and then it’s temporarily very stable
i’ve been trying to describe the exact way it feels like reading too much For You damages my brain and it has to do with the way that seeing viral tweets jostles my sense of importance. “oh a million people paid attention to this thing i guess it’s important”
@visakanv has a tweet i won’t be able to find atm about how his approach to managing ADHD is to take extensive notes. one of the several things i think this accomplishes is that every note you take is a vote about what’s important to you
@visakanv so the question of how to manage or even heal ADHD changes from “how do i get better at paying attention to things?” to “how do i stabilize my sense of what’s important?” which strikes me as a much richer question, a spiritual and religious and meaning-making question
@QiaochuYuan yea this is roughly parallel with why i took so long to write Introspect, I really thought initially it would be a simple task but the princess was repeatedly in another castle https://t.co/IChSWQGbCg
4. a fun summary of the many iterations of my drafts is: i've been finding out that to address your boredom you have to address your desires, and to address your desires you have to investigate your self-concept, and to investigate your self-concept is to annihilate yourself
@visakanv if it was straightforward people would already be good at it! there’s like a ~efficient market sort of quality i think, like the leverage points that aren’t already easy to use stay unused b/c they’re twisty or backwards or recursive etc.
@visakanv this is the vibe! https://t.co/8SkbE6EqEf
People like my mother who pray several times a day do not get ADHD because prayer serves to reinforce intention. This is purely anecdotal evidence, of course, but something about repeatedly training attention to cultivate specific conative states is giving prayers an edge. https://t.co/7jOWx71txb
@QiaochuYuan https://t.co/uPoy7QO9er
I’ve basically taught myself to manage my ADHD with notes and threads. My “schedule intelligence” (deadlines, calendars, checklist) is terrible but my recognition and web-jumping is fantastic, so I spent something like a decade using the latter to build an elaborate mind-palace https://t.co/A2E4okufzH
@QiaochuYuan yeah, ADHD people have plenty of attention. what seems missing is a fluidity of attention, not attention it's only called "attention-deficit" because our culture associates attention with "sit in a place and focus on something you don't like for an hour" https://t.co/O4o1XEXDN2
@QiaochuYuan lots of people making similar points https://t.co/65MauQfmrh https://t.co/e9gFbwYCzh
@QiaochuYuan it seems a similar confusion to what @sympatheticopp says about "hyperstimuli are understimulating" hyperstimuli are not too much of one thing, they're too little of the nutrient that really satiates us https://t.co/YspoxCzNCG https://t.co/LmcO9fsu0y
