this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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ADHD

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Im wondering if this is a common adhd thing.

For example, I have always wanted to program, but I can't let myself start with some easy gui building block code. I need to understand how the code is interacting with the computer itself and know how they did it in the 80s. Then of course it's too hard for me and I give up.

Or if im making music, I need to do everything from scratch the hard way, making it as hard as possible (and killing any creative effort i had in the beginning).

It's the same with anything. I can't progress if I dont know the absolute reason why something is being done. And if I do it the easy way, I didn't do it right and took shortcuts so it was worthless.

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[–] Acklavidian@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

I can certainly relate. I remember disassembling mechanical things as a young kid and it always bugged me that there was this digital level of design that I couldn't physically investigate intuitively. Then once I started programming I remembered initially being disappointed by the concept of scripting/dynamic language. It felt like if I tried to imagine the twinkle of the 1s and 0s as they moved around the machine the patterns would more divorced from the physical hardware. Probably not an accurate or valid abstraction but it is the model that I mentally interact with at a high concept level. I've grown more partial to dynamic languages since then but only as I've come to terms with the underlying mechanisms. ADHD needs solid walls to bounce off of and having a interpreter that exists in this virtual environment doesn't naturally capture my trust. So in my hubris I doubt the veracity of the tools and learn that it requires a context change to dig in to the lower level of the issue which is demoralizing as an ADHD person. And now because I want to mitigate future context change I spend a lot of time forecasting potential context changes and quickly get overwhelmed by my own efforts.