No matter the size of your parachute/coping mechanism, if you fall on Jupiter, it's not the (decelerated) fall that kills you, it's the jostling torture of simultaneously hitting fluid from under you, and being crushed by the weight of fluid above.
Unfortunately other economies and models of social order demand similarly horrific obedience, and capitalism is not alone. It's just the thing we got stuck with.
Feels like a prison on both sides of the bars.
No. I have ADHD. The most obvious symptom has nothing to do with "being bored"—it's that I can't gather the motivation to practice any skill that I'm not already naturally good at, even when I really really want to be good at that skill. Similarly, I can't take care of pets, or even plants; I can't be anywhere on time; and I forget at least one thing I absolutely need to bring with me every time I leave the house. (Also, I'm absolutely never able to decide where to go to eat, rather than only unable to do so when worn out from work.)
Just as a clinically depressed person will still experience subjectively negative qualia even in a perfect world, a person with ADHD will be unable to remain focused on working toward even what they would subjectively consider the most wonderfully worthwhile goals.
ADHD medication allows me (that is, the part of my brain that holds my sense of identity) to take control of what "I" (that is, the part of my brain that decides whether things are worth doing right now) want to do with my life. If I (brain piece #1) am the rider of an extremely petulant horse (brain piece #2), the medication is a spur on the boot of #1, by which #2 can be brought to heel.
(Now, my case is probably unusual: I went to a psychiatrist after taking an ADHD self-assessment as an adult, rather than being diagnosed as a child. But I assure you that there is at least a core group of people within the "diagnosed with ADHD" group who, like me, consider their ADHD a thing they suffer from just as much as clinical depression is for those who have it, and would find it just as much of an obstacle to enjoying their lives even if they lived alone in a cabin in the woods.)
I can't gather the motivation to practice any
skill that I'm not already naturally good at,
even when I really really want to be good at
that skill.
Similarly, I can't take care of pets, or even
plants;
I can't be anywhere on time;
and I forget at least one thing I absolutely
need to bring with me every time I leave the
house.
Meanwhile, the relief you describe is the very premise of stimulant addiction. Stimulants make people feel like capable superheroes on the up, and miserable incompetant failures on the comedown.
That is how speed works. That's why people like it. You don't have a disability. You just like speed. Everyone likes speed. Lab animals like speed, and they have no social obligations.
If you ever learned how to cook meth, while taking your meds, you'd probably never come back.
You come off like you carry a grudge!
"Man up snowflake, life is tough."
*WHOOP* *WHOOP* Pull over, shame police!
From 1990 forward I watched a trend of chemical leashes swallow up perfectly normal kids, to test subordination to parent/teacher/doctor control and extract bragging rights while keeping up with the Joneses. Loads of high school classmates got shamed by their parents into "just say no" prescription drug doublespeak, because B+ just isn't good enough.
Before there was the prescription opioid pill crisis, there was the prescription pep pill crisis, masquerading as the "you are mentally ill and need a chemical crutch to be normal" crisis. I didn't start that trend. I didn't invent it. I didn't make money off it.
Point your shame finger at the real enemy, if you can guess where to find it.
It's not just "being bored"; it creates serious difficulty in day-to-day and long-term functioning.
it creates serious difficulty in day-to-day
and long-term functioning.
Being a worker bot is not the benchmark of normalcy. It's simply the burden we are saddled with by others.
1) The current approach completely disregards the data point of, "which psychoactives have worked for you (and presumably, those similarly situated to you) in the past?" This seems so absolutely reckless it's amazing it continues.
2) The current approach regards some portion of the population as "normal," and attempts to treat the rest. By looking instead at diet (ie, "self-medicating") as a spectrum, along which a great many healthy approaches lie, we respect and leverage the underlying psychological diversity of the population.
So the addicted will get slightly improvements from their drug. Some of them enough to reduce their chance of a clinical diagnosis.
Most people won't be close enough to (the very blurry) line to swap between diagnosed and subclinical.
Your comment assumes the psychiatric profession is generally meretricious and evidence-driven. Many psychiatric patients' experience suggests otherwise.
Hmm perhaps also because smoking behavior probably doesn't change much without accompanying lifestyle changes and confounding factors.
Still we didn't have schizophrenics who happened to pick up smoking and were completely cured, right? (right?) So the magnitude of effect is helpful, but not curative.
Marijuana: OCD
Caffeine: ADHD
Anecdotally: I developed a drinking problem in my first few years of work, which I used to deal with anxiety and depression as I failed to find my feet and seriously questioned dropping out of software development.
I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive) and through treatment, experienced a complete life change.
I stopped drinking excessively, then almost completely. I never tried to address the problem directly, I just lost any desire to drink outside of a normal social context. Even then, I rarely have more than 2-3 in a night.
I'm on stimulants for treatment, but take breaks some weekends and over holidays. I've always been a coffee drinker, but now I'm conscious of how much I'm drawn to it for the positive effects I see.
I honestly think it was the only reason I got through university (before diagnosed / treated for ADHD). I was using caffeine in the same way I use my current medication, to fill the same gaps.
I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of self medication, or anything diagnosis related. I just find it interesting the correlation between certain personality types and the class of drugs they seem to be drawn to. I think it offers a lot of psychological insight we haven't really looked at in detail.
In general, it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate drug withdrawal from re-emergence of a pre-existing condition.
I have had the most success with vaping green crack at 210C. Oil concentrates also work, but I tend to overshoot the functional sweet spot and end up recreationally high.
Smoking was much harder to nail down. It worked occasionally, enough to justify buying the vape... But the vape is way better.