Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 26

Since ADHD is a matter of degree, determining whether a given medication is working is a challenge.

Everyone can have bright ideas that turn out to be bad ideas later on. Everyone can forget things. Everyone can daydream. Everyone can be a bit lazy or feel bored.

Those are not signs of ADHD. They are only signs of ADHD if they are severe enough to prevent you from living a good life.

Went ahead and measured the noise level at the E18 motorway at the Lysaker bus stop in Oslo, Norway. It's pretty loud and I find it somewhat uncomfortable to stand there without noise cancelling headphones on.

Oh, wow, the new Mastodon interface offers a lot less information overload.

It feels like none of the news sites in Norway are covering the same things. You'd expect them to contain many of the same stories, but that only seems to apply to the foreign events coverage. For the domestic stuff, the political stances of the editors seems to determine what gets covered.

It also strikes me that we will toss out a phrase like "they treated us like animals" without pausing to think about what this implies about our conduct toward animals.

If treating other humans like animals (slavery) was bad, isn't it also bad to treat animals like slaves? I would argue it's even creepier with animals, since we control how they breed too.

Imagine if slavery had continued for long enough for selective breeding to be effective. That's basically the situation for farm animals.

I'm not a veg(etari)an, but it's always so funny to me when I hear an argument like "We should let farm animals have good lives."

We say this about creatures that we are later going to murder with a blow to the head.

I mean, yes, there's no need to create unnecessary suffering, but isn't it kind of overshadowed by the fact that they're basically slaves to us? Slaves that we bred. We selected the most docile ones with good meat, and bred them. Imagine if they were humans and we did that...

Yeah, whenever anyone investigates the meat industry, they always find horrible animal cruelty, and it's unfortunately no different in Norway. You wouldn't expect it, because we're a small wealthy country with relatively low food production volumes and high standards of animal welfare.

Even if you do take good care of them, it's still not great, because all that humaneness is nulled by the fact that you're going to kill them with a blow to the head later on anyway.

@TheCzar I'm not sure if normal people get restless legs though. I think people are generally able to stay still even when they're tired. Me? I know when the drugs are wearing off because my legs start doing things.

@TheCzar You don't feel tired as such, but you kind of think as though you are, and finding the energy to do boring or unpleasant but necessary tasks is very difficult. Few people would choose to do those things right before bedtime.

@TheCzar I think the closest approximation for a normal person is what they experience when they're very tired and start being unfocused and goofy, but also, what sometimes happens when trying to sleep and thoughts start spinning out of control.

@TheCzar Rumination. Yes. It definitely has a loop-like quality, like you're chanting things to yourself and it's kind of incoherent at times.

@TheCzar But... I'm smart. I have a good mind. It just wasn't a very focused one. I'm in the right profession for that. It's just that I have a disorder.

@TheCzar I tried being a freelancer for a while so I could jump from task to task, but that didn't work for me, because freelancing in the computer industry still means working on projects for weeks or months. I pretty much have the worst profession for someone with ADHD. It's absolutely crucial for me to have the ability to concentrate for extended periods of time. I could manage it for some things but not others. Performance was very very variable.

It's almost as if the ADHD meds feed the little captain or pilot in my brain. He was there all along, but felt quite helpless because although he had a rudder in front of him, he was very lethargic, and turning the rudder significantly would exhaust him. All he could manage was minor course adjustments. He would get stronger in emergencies, but only until the immediate chrisis had subsided. With age, he got a little stronger, but was still quite weak until I began to take the meds recently.

What the ADHD meds have done for me is actually slightly unnerving because it has separated two parts of my mind that were very difficult to keep separate before:

1. Sensible long term planning linear reasoning guy.

2. Hysterical playful incoherent pleasure guy.

The two are very hard to separate without drugs. I have caught myself writing "we" about myself in my ADHD journal because a guy 1 is in control and can dismiss the nonsense, excuses and bad ideas guy 2 comes up with.

So, in retrospect, yes, having ADHD *is* like having a source of noise in your head, and if you actually need to concentrate, you have to push hard to get it out of the way for a minute so you can hear yourself think, and it takes so much effort to do this that you rarely bother. The only time trying to focus doesn't wear you out is when what you're doing offers instant reward.

Here's the funny part about getting diagnosed with ADHD: Know how they say ADHD makes your head noisy, like a TV that keeps changing channels that you can't turn off?

Well, before I took meds for the first time, I didn't quite get it. "Yes, idle thoughts drift from one place to the next," I thought, "but isn't that normal?"

As it turns out in retrospect, they were more like rapid wandering play babbling (like a child talking to itself during play) than actual coherent lines of reasoning.

@Fatih19 I have a 15" 2015 model that I bought brand new in 2018 right before Apple took that model away from their website. It was the last decent model.

@kungtotte I'm not American, but I'm from a NATO country, so we're always tagging along to assist in whatever America is doing. Norway's armed forces are minuscule, but from what I'm hearing, our commando troops are respected. Also, there's a weapon systems company in Kongsberg that develops missiles for the Joint Strike Fighter. It's ironic that Norway also gives out the Nobel Peace Prize...

@kungtotte What I find really nasty about that machinery is that Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without it. It began as Radar Valley during WWII. After the war, the same microwave technology was used for microwave links between phone exchanges, and later, the first wireless computer networks, and ultimately, WiFi and 4G. NASA as it existed in the late 60s was an extension of this machinery. It's the most powerful force in the American economy. It's not always active, but when it is, it's intense.