alt Hacker NewsI think another cause is our media environment.
Assuming ADHD is to some extent a chemical thing (I.e. brain didn’t properly develop impulse control or attention span or whatever), we now live in a world that enables those exact things.
If you lived in a world where the principal media were written articles/books and long-form TV shows/movies, your brain was still trained to focus.
Most media is now basically an ADHD simulator, with constant context switching, intense stimuli etc. which only reinforces whatever ADHD traits one may have.
I would guess it’s somewhat similar to the interaction between smoking and asthma.
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Yes, our modern world is perfected to provide as much distractions to ADHD brain as possible, while working life has become more mentally demanding. Lots of people who struggle now would have done okay 50, 100 years ago when there were less distractions, and larger share of population did physical jobs instead of knowledge work.
ADHD results in a dopamine imbalance which results in the sort of novelty seeking behaviors they tend to exhibit.
Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.
There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.