A Less Beautiful Mind

I found this article yesterday via Chamath Palihapitiya’s Substack, which continues to be a source of insight into a variety of topics both business-related and otherwise. There’s a great deal about modernity I care about but either don’t understand or struggle to comprehend, and he’s one of a growing cohort of minds I follow because of their blend of honesty and intellectual heft. It’s rare to come across people who know what they’re talking about, and it’s even rarer to find ones who do something about the things they’ve learned. Mix in the engines of deliberate misinformation and the ever-present implication from our attention-based online economy that our voice matters, and it becomes easier to see how the various social platforms have become factories for horrendously reductive takes. We’re becoming more aware of the ways in which we’ve never spoken up for ourselves in our individual lives while being constantly presented with a buffet of things to be enraged about, and the rest takes care of itself. This makes it possible to suppose that could Descartes resurrect himself in the modern era, he might update his famous ontological reflection to be “I post, therefore I am” as a joke to try and relate, but it’s more likely that he’d look at the modern digital landscape and put a pistol in his mouth post haste.

The article I mentioned comes from Yashar Ali, and it’s titled What It’s Like To Have ADHD. As someone who’s a year and change out from my own formal diagnosis with it, I found the ADHD Simulator video and Ali’s writing around his own suffering and struggle with the disorder both deeply human and horrifically relatable. Not 18 hours earlier I’d been in couples therapy crying over the impact it has on our household and the despair I feel from a life spent constantly barraged with demands to pay attention or focus or be present. And Ali touches on a point that felt particularly meaningful given my own context: ADHD exists in much of the collective consciousness as a pseudo-scientific diagnosis that most people suspect is just a cover for laziness or lack of discipline. That people who have it likely are relaxing into the comfy armchair of labelized self-victimization and are unwilling to “do the work.” As if we’re losing romantic or work or social relationships because we’d just rather not get our ass in gear or have grown attached to the modern narcotic of Me-Me-Me-ism to a particularly severe degree. Rather than, perhaps, suffering from an internal reality that non-havers can’t relate to as much as they believe they can after spending a few minutes thinking about it.

Thankfully, Ali’s takes here are unsnarky and thoroughly lived-in, and the comfort I found from his piece came mostly from the humility and relatability of the writing. And I was struck as I re-read it early this morning on my patio that part of the difficulty I feel with moving forward with my life comes from the grief that came with the more rudimentary mechanics of living it up to this point. It’s a brute, non-self-narrative reality that the vast majority of my life has been spent in environments and around people clamoring incessantly about the ways in which they think I should be different, and it’s had a now-undeniable effect on me which I have been trying, and struggling, to shake. Constantly answering why are you like this or why are you here for several decades will erode your emotions to the bone, and my uncharacteristic sob to my therapist this week came out as a defeated admission that I don’t know where I have to go or what I have to do to make it stop. The commitments of a furnace-adjacent interior world which may occasionally jettison beautiful things correctly feels volcanic and brutal, and any sort of remedy understandably incomplete. You can of course be present and aware as the smoke begins to trickle out, but it’s hard to appreciate the value of any eruption when it eats through the flesh and jungle of your life.

Unfortunately this isn’t going to resolve in a crescendo-directed point. I don’t really have one, other than that it felt a bit relieving to listen to someone else describe my life for me and I’m tired of living as a problematic circus monkey both within my own mind and without. I tend to anchor myself these days in the Rah-Rah turn your pain into energy shit, but I find myself currently at the end of a week in which I just felt fucking stuck and alone and wanting a way out. And I’ve started to suspect I find myself in that place far more often than I’ve wanted to admit. I know this sort of frustration or alienation generally comes in waves, and I’m sure it will pass, but in the meantime things like Ali’s article have helped me feel less isolated and insane, and a bit more at peace with the fact that that sort of pressure release might be the only real answer there is. Maybe everything in life just requires translation, and maybe the loneliness I feel is just an awareness that there is always a piece of glass between ourselves and everyone else. But regardless, I hope that article helps you in some way if you’re dealing with a similar type of thing and sending you a happy Saturday from Austin. Thank you (as always) for reading.