this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Can ADHD be almost the right way to handle undesired work?
If one doesn't want to do work, it's straight forward to not do it. If that isn't allowed then doing everything else is the closest thing to avoiding that work. In that sense, ADHD is either a way of avoiding to be broken or the inability to integrate work into one's accepted goals.
How could it be possible to accept work that one doesn't want to do?
I think there's still a problem in that you need to do some things that are undesired in order to maintain yourself - Household chores, for example. Some things are non negotiable, and for those you need to be able to force yourself, as unpleasant as it is.
In modern society you either work or starve. There's no adventurous alternative as would have been available before modernity.
It's mind boggling how different the modern concept of work is from how it was for 99.9% of human existence.
I'm sure the hyper-optimization, hyper-specialization, the alienation, and the constant flux of modern work contributes greatly to the problems we are experiencing.
Even when there was no "adventurous alternative", work was a lot more grounded in society and had a lot more downtime at pretty much any point in history.
This is from David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years. It's an anecdote his grad school advisor told him about a Samoan lying around on the beach.
MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.
SAMOAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing?
MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?
SAMOAN: And why would I want to do that?
MISSIONARY: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.
SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
MISSIONARY: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.
SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
MISSIONARY: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.