My experience with ADHD is that I either do pick it up extremely easily, or I get frustrated and quit within an hour.
An hour? How do you make it that far? If I can’t pick it up within 10 minutes, I’m not learning that skill.
I mean it’s worked before? 😅 New hobby let’s goooo
I feel like the ADHD community is embracing a whole raft of symptoms that I thought were more bipolar ii related because this sure sounds a lot like me during one of my hypomanic phases. i’m not sure where the nuanced distinctions are… maybe it comes down to whether you also spend thousands of dollars on gear to support said project and/or just decide sleep is optional while you’re tackling it? or crash into a depressive phase triggered by frustration when you inevitably fail and abandon it? IDK
I suspected I had ADHD and nothing else when I went to get diagnosed. One of the things I thought was a problem caused by ADHD was how I feel about other people as well as not having any sort of neutral emotions. Turns out I have Borderline Personality Disorder (and what was formerly known as Asperger’s still when I got diagnosed), which I hadn’t even heard of until I was diagnosed with it.
If in doubt, get checked out. A lot of mental illnesses have overlapping symptoms and it takes a professional to sort them out, and I do see a lot of people simply self-disgnosing based on how they feel when seeing memes.
Hey I’m someone who can answer this.
ADHD, by itself, does not have manic episodes. There’s a lot of supporting documentation to that effect.
Mania is often caused by having too much dopamine. ADHDers don’t have enough dopamine ever, unless with medication, or with hyperfocus.
So the similarity you’re seeing is only in that people with ADHD will negotiate, move things around, eat only ramen for a month in order to buy things related to the new hyperfocus. Pursuing the hyperfocus gives us dopamine, so we will do lots to justify getting that, since we don’t have any. People with bipolar can have manic episodes which can be caused by an abundance of dopamine, which leads them to doing things they shouldn’t, because they can’t control themselves.
I can’t speak for others, but all of the blockhead decisions I’ve ever made while hyperfocusing and buying too many supplies, I’ve absolutely known I shouldn’t, and why I shouldn’t, but I’m trying to get my fix so I’m going to buy that lockpicking kit, thankyouverymuch, and if I have to eat ramen for a week to do it, I will!
(Pro tip I got from someone else online. If the hyperfocus gets you bad, spend lots and lots of extra time shopping for, researching, and making damn sure the thing you want to buy is the perfect one for your hyperfocus. I’ve been able to buy myself a couple of weeks this way, which allowed me to save up. I treat hyperfocus like unexpected car maintenance problems nowadays.)
What about if I have like 6 projects running all the time that I actually improve on? Even finishing them sometimes.
I’m trying to figure myself out, and your post hit kinda hard 😅
Well the hyperfocus does as it wills… but sometimes you can get a hyperfocus in something you can improve on! Most of us do that, actually. In all my life, and I’m almost 40, I’ve only had one hyperfocus that I absolutely can’t do. I still try every so often.
And having a lot of projects going at once is about the only way we can focus. I only ever did well in school in classes where my teachers let me either read a book or play with aying cards while they taught. Many of us can only multitask.
Wow thank you. I always thought ADHD was about people having problems focusing by not being able to do so, and other problems like sitting still, that I don’t really feel I have.
Now, I can focus, incredibly well, I guess it’s called hyperfocus :-) Now it has a name, thanks!
Also being called out because I doodle during meetings (among other things) and the idea that some people just can’t not do several things at the same time, well that hit home 100%.
I think I need to think about this a bit, it feels like I finally found out what’s up with me, any advice greatly appreciated.
If it helps, when I was a kid, the conventional wisdom was “girls don’t get ADHD.” Which is why I didn’t get diagnosed until I was about 36.
Nowadays, we know better. And we can use that knowledge to do better! Which is why I’m finally in college.
Thank you, this comment helped me understand something, because during hypomania I legitimately do not notice except in hindsight that my priorities may have been off; everything makes total sense in a way that it doesn’t when I’m not in that state. Similarly, until I bought a smart watch that could track sleep and started wearing it to bed, I actually didn’t notice how little sleep I would get during these phases–sometimes less than four hours a night for a straight week, and I would barely feel any difference. It sounds like there is more of a kind of self-awareness during ADHD hyperfocus, and sometimes I have that as well–I’m learning to discern which is which, just like I learned to use indicators like sleep to recognize when I am at risk of a hypomanic episode.
There are many parallels between various mental illnesses.
And also normal state of human being.
Nah this is pretty average for ADHD too. Maybe not sinking a fuckload of money (I guess it depends on the person) but hyperfixations are a thing. Get really focused on one thing because it gives you dopamine so you sink more and more time into it until no more dopamine. Suddenly it becomes a chore to do like everything else, you feel betrayed, and end up in a feeling of malaise trying to find your next hit of dopamine.
I’ve never pursued any formal diagnosis and just have the observations of my own mind to go on, but I have a lot of common ADHD symptoms and I do sometimes have the kinds of manic phases you’re describing but not to a debilitating severity. It’s just this state of high energy, usually for me involves creative output, and yeah other previously important goals wind up feeling secondary.
Happy to sacrifice sleep, etc., but I don’t usually make damaging decisions, I’m able to keep my broader priorities in mind at least. Better today than I used to be at that but it never really caused me big problems.
But it feels a lot like a mild version of the comic - my last one was a big, kind of involved Halloween build. Wooden construction that included lights, a fog machine, and a 3’x3’ sheet of plexiglass with a big printed decal. I’ve never designed/built a Halloween decoration in my life, or much that’s very similar. Other times it’s a software project, or something musical. Kinda thing that pulls me outta bed in the middle of the night for no real reason, just (almost annoyingly) stoked. Until it passes.
No idea what that says about ADHD and the broader “symptom creep” you’re describing (imo, accurately).
That’s how I learned PHP in a week with no Internet or reference books. Had a couple open source projects on a thumb drive, an a strong urge to eat sometime that month. Reverse engineered one project into a movie rental system, and sold it to a gas station for $500.
God, that code was awful
It’s PHP - no matter how you’d learn it, the code would still be awful.
I just want to do something new and interesting. Not more tedious bullshit. Unfortunately everything eventually turns into more tedious bullshit.
“Butter the toast, eat the toast, shit the toast. God life’s relentless.”
That’s not ADHD man, that’s “fake it 'til you make it”.
That’s how I’m still in this job.
I ain’t trying to make it. I don’t want to do programming. This is more of a nightmare than I expected. I hate every second of it. I’m doing it to try and pay my electricity bill.
Ah. So you’ve officially become…
An Adult™
More like I’ve officially become…
Unemployed for a month with no income/savings and desperate as fuck™
And completely abandoning it the next day
Either that or it becomes my new personality for weeks because I managed to figure it out along the way. Then, after spending too much time and money on it, it’s completely abandoned.
only to be rediscovered months or years later, hypefixated on some more, and then abandoned again
I see you’re familiar with my work.
Yea but after doing this 5 times you start to get a good grasp on the subject! XD
Hey, do I come into your house to insult you?
You can if you want, Daddy
I’m more for world of warships personally.
Same.
Relatable but has nothing to do with ADHD
I’m a linux admin with very little development experience (amateur at bash scripting, did some python in school, understand the concepts of object-oriented programming, but that’s pretty much it) doing rustlings in my spare time. I want to be able to contribute to open source projects and be able to understand more of the discussion in the FOSS space, but it’s pretty hard to see the big picture tbh and I don’t know if I’m wasting my time.
Wasting your time? impossible. All you’re learning will at least gently affect everything else you do. Will you contribute meaningfully to foss? only time will tell.
Like any craft, you git good by doing. The first program I wrote was in ASIC to fix 2500 computers on a LAN. We were a small shop (7 ppl) providing on-site support for a large complex. We were gearing up to have to go to 2500 desks and edit win.ini to make sure Vshare was set up for ccMail.
I stayed late a couple nights and wrote a little app to copy win.ini line by line to a new file and fix vshare in the process. Then, it ran some sanity checks to make sure the file looked good, and the files were swapped out. Saved us a LOT of time.
A few jobs later, we had a Cold Fusion/IIS server that would occasionally corrupt logs and we needed reports on the logs for our clients. I couldn’t nail down what caused the error. The files were multiple gigabytes in the day where an entire company could comfortably work off of 2GB. I found the problem, they were missing a linebreak once in a while, and the analytics app we were using would just shit the bed on that.
I needed to break up the offending lines or at least remove them. I didn’t have enough time or space to copy them to a new file.
This was pre-2000 so the languages and tooling were pretty dumb.
I learned some PHP, but memory was an issue, abandoned I learned some Perl that worked, but it took many hours, and I’d have to dedicate a box to just fixing the logs every morning. I finally bit the bullet and learned enough C to fix it; it only took an hour to run.
Since then, I’ve just been learning to solve problem after problem and have chosen tools that I didn’t know. Keep on amateuring. Do small projects and cron jobs with different languages/tools.
Branch out into new languages when you have to start finding hacks to do things in current languages. Once you get good at working on smaller pictures, the big pictures won’t look as daunting.
I have zero programming experience and zero computer know how at all. I am, however, out of a job and in desperate need for cash for the simple basics. So I dunno how long this is going to take but not being able to see the big picture and not knowing if I’m wasting my time… oh my christ do I relate to that. Even the request had me staring at it like “Oh god.” I did warn them that there was no guarantee it would ever materialize due to my own failings and if it did it would be a hot damn minute.
I have so many saved tabs right now about rust and apis and docker and sql stuff. For someone whose total computer knowledge is “Settings where the things go” and “don’t delete system32” this is… terrifying.
Don’t feel bad if jobs don’t drop out of the sky just because you learned a little rust. Rust jobs do not abound, even for experienced devs. That said, its an interesting and challenging language and doing some work in it can show you’re motivated and willing to work through some shit to get things done. Google-fu is a primary skill for everyone in the field.
Oh I’m not doing this to primarily learn Rust for anything else other than this specific job. I am going to be looking into other languages later but this is just to put food on the table for me and the cat. It’s evidently a rather simple thing, to an extent, so hopefully it won’t take me too long.
godspeed! the rust community is knowledgeable and helpful. check out the discourse server if you haven’t already.
I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but I have absolutely no programming experience and no knowledge of anything that happens behind the usual user-facing side of a UI and I just finished a project involving a ton of SQL and VBA and API calls using only ChatGPT. I basically just told it to treat me like a moron and gave it all the details I could. It took a while troubleshooting the dozens of errors along the way, but everything works now and I learned a ton.
I mean, I think it is perfectly valid to “figure it out”
this worked so far for me
I’m trying to self host a webste I’ve never done anything like this before, nor do i know HTML/CSS
It’s worked out well for me! I redid the lighting in my living room over the weekend, including hardwiring it into the mains. Plus I spent the summer rebuilding an antique motorcycle!
Eh, i use that to my strength and become the expert at work. Although, the topic has to interest me and I’ve worked with my boss and to tell him “this ain’t it for me” and find me a project better suited for me.
