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  • Cross disciplinary skills are necessary for invention.

    I like to think of ADHD as a beneficial mutagen in our technological and artistic evolution.

    • Absolutely. I have found that going hard into my non-tech hobbies is really good for me. Subjects that I veered away from in school (e.g., chemistry) can become big hyper-focus-worthy aspects of my hobbies (e.g., the nitrogen cycle and all the organic chemistry that goes into oxidation of the organics in my koi pond).

      And some other interests of mine, like having a part time photography business for the past decade, allow me to learn more STEM shit (optics) as well as have an artistic and creative outlet. And even today that has morphed into video editing as an activity with my son.

      It's even true when I limit the context to my career. I am a software engineer and have loved programming since the "manually number every line" days of BASIC on Apple II school computers in the '90s. But my education and career have run the gamut from semiconductor design and physics (and the quantum quantum quantum!) to computer engineering and logic/assembly, to general electronics, to manufacturing & testing & quality assurance of electronics, to straight-up business administration, to UNIX/Linux, and now to writing software for embedded Linux systems that use in-house electronics.

      At work the cross disciplinary skills help not just for being on a cross-functional design team, but for figuring out a complicated system that was half completed several years ago by people who no longer work there.

      They say that variety is the spice of life, but it's even better if you are neurospicy yourself.

    • As a professional evolutionary psychologist (and definitely not someone who just read this on the internet somewhere and can't find a source), ADHD was probably beneficial tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. The mf who got bored of living in a village for 20 years and decided to walk hundreds of miles until they found a really cool hill is the mf founding new villages and moving into Europe, and Asia, and the Americas, and Australia

  • That's probably true, but I don't like self-diagnoses, and I don't even know where to begin to get a professional diagnosis

    So until then, I'm a jack of all trades with some cocktail of undiagnosed aneurotypicalities

  • Why Christian Bale? It should be a guy who tried to trim his beard but gave up. Also, I'm a bit of a barber.

    • This also confused me. Also though, a lot of memes confuse me, specifically the ones that say "me when..." Because the person's expression often is kind of mixed and unclear to me. Afaik I'm not autistic.

38 comments