My curiosity absolutely does not disappear when I'm medicated! I'd rather say that it gets refined and sharpened such that I can better filter out noisey ideas that irrelevant and focus on my curiosity and creativity such that I can actually execute on the ideas I have.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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ADHD
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Alas, I have the 'nothing at all gives me dopamine' ADHD. I thought it was just depression for years, but turns out it was ADHD. I struggle to see any benefits that come from my condition.
ADHD can correlate with depression. You still need to treat the depression though. Untreated depression will indeed blind you to anything positive about anything.
Yup, it‘s probably that. In a societal vacuum, the curiosity would exist, but the daily struggle and resulting depression overshadows it.
(Source: Been through it, currently recovering.)
Duh.
You think a behavior that was handled in humanity for thousands of years would be fully disadvantageous or perhaps just we are letting our world be dominated by what a few think it should look like?
It may not fit into the current world but that is more a statement on it than us.
It's like my boss says
"Just shut up and do your job"
Right now I am into mushrooms but that doesn't pay the bills
Yeah i wish it was easier to get in and out of jobs. I would open a really awesome popcorn shop i think but i cant risk the bills.
But thats the flaw of our current society that we cant explore how we can help make the world a little more full instead of utilitarian.
PFFT advantage of asking too many questions and pissing off all the normals? Yup, got it.
“And she often obsessed over random projects before abruptly abandoning them.”
Preach.
Yesh I really feel like it’s a double edged sword. Like you could excel at so many things if you could only stick to it.
You know the saying: Hypercuriosity hyperkilled the hypercat.
Turns out safety regulations are written in our blood
hyperthe*
Yeah I have it, it's let me learn a lot of new things but it falters when I really want to explore those things or God forbid, get better at them
I mean it's a "water is wet" kind of "discovery" for anyone who has or understands ADHD, but it's nice to see it spelled out in an accessible way for laymen. Many types of neurodivergence have advantages, it's just that those advantages are not as impactful as the disadvantages because they the disadvantages break societal norms. Just like a person in a wheelchair breaks the societal norm of stairs. Unless accommodations are made, they disabled person is unable to participate in society and thus they are unable to use or sometimes even show their advantages.
It doesn't help that we have a fundamentally broken society to begin with.
Society hyperoptimized on ~~productivity~~ profit such that taking time to enjoy a side quest is frowned upon...
While that's true, there are common objectives that benefit the whole: food, shelter, health, art, and of course rest and recreation. The ability to prioritize and stick to a plan is challenging, for everyone. Who wouldn't rather be doing something fun?
There's a balance there somewhere. I often ignore it at my own peril.
TBF, we're the ones who've always known "water" isn't "wet", it does the wettening. 🤷🏼♂️
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I mean, downhill I guess 🤷
I read the article, but I don't understand how hypercuriosity is a benefit. It's more annoying than anything, because I can't do anything practical with it.
It‘s a benefit for society. Some people being weird and trying new ways to improve tasks are eventually successful. Think caveman constantly rolling down things a hill and inventing the wheel.
I think most people who have it figure this out pretty quickly. NT normies feel like they accept the world completely at face value by comparison and it can cause a lot of friction
I was regularly told to stop asking “too many” questions in class when I was a kid.
Funny thing is, this has helped me enormously in my career. Everyone else is simply trudging along on assumptions and I swoop in with a dozen edge cases that we simply aren’t handling.
Schooling beats a specific kind of “curiosity” into you, while beating out a much more general “what if this assumption isn’t the case.”
Monkey-see, monkey-do is a powerful survival skill. For neurotypical people, it's easy to just reproduce learned behaviors, without the reasoning behind them. I find interesting parallels with generative AI. You see it a lot in creative pursuits especially. So many people totally miss subtext. I think you also see it a lot while driving.
And it's largely an education problem. There's no reason neurotypicals can't think critically, but it's much easier to teach them to just slot into a role without any real understanding (Religion is very good at this). I think that's also the reason conventional education can be so difficult for people that aren't neurotypical. It's meant to teach you what to do, not why
I definitely find myself to be at an advantage compared to most neurotypical people I have worked with. In aggregate though, the ease they have moving with the flow can end up being more of an advantage in the long term, especially in largely neurotypical spaces. It can be very frustrating
Oh my god. I was too, and my parents always said it too, it gave me a weird complex growing up. Like...do you people not have questions or care? Wtf?
I was always told "I don't know, ask your grandfather" He was in education and had encyclopedic knowledge of so many things!
When I was in the army, my sergeant's favorite phrase was " elucubra, don't think", which looking back is kind of ironic, as I was in a scout unit, and we were expected to go behind enemy lines and think outside the box to find ways for the company to breach the lines.
Got slammed for asking why for context. Ended up in the O room for “being too smart”
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So if you ever wonder who it was that figured out you can eat something weird way back in history, sounds like it was probably someone with ADHD lol
I'm offended by the attention deficit and the disorder part. I don't have a deficit, I have an abundance of attention, it's just not linear. I have parallel attention, not serial. In my close circle I'm the guy people often go for answers, because I often have them, albeit often somewhat superficial, because it's near impossible to go deep in any subject, unless hyperfocus kicks in.
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“Dampening such impulsive behavior so that the child can focus and succeed makes intuitive sense. But what if dampening the child’s impulsivity also dampens curiosity?”
Perfectly explains my struggle with learning physics in school and it quickly becoming a hobby of mine when i stopped being medicated when i no longer went to school.
“When you look at the way people with ADHD learn, and especially if they are hypercurious, they start reading something and they’re like, ‘Ooh what is that? I want to learn about this. What is that? Does it connect to that?’ It looks a lot more like a messy mind map rather than a straight [line],” Le Cunff says. “The problem is when there’s no space for exploration.”
I cannot express to you how much this captures my experience reading. It can sometimes take days for me to get past a page when I'm constantly stopping to look up other things a passage made me think of or write down ideas and questions.
I feel this too when I play video games. I like to open every box, go through every door, listen to all the recordings etc. When I play coop with my husband it drives him a bit nuts when he wants to focus on a specific quest and I'm exploring.
I am right there with you in games. I've been playing Enshrouded with my partner and some friends recently, and we've gotten into arguments on continuing the quest, versus exploring, versus building lol
It's very interesting to me to see how other people can just walk past something without looking into it, or, even more foreign to me, remember it, and come back later. I, personally, have to completely explore an area outright the first time, because I know I will not be interested in going back through it in the future
Oh yes and on games I often pause them to look up some random question like which skill is the best to inherit or something. I do soo much research on games I play despite my best intentions to just be in the moment.
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Love this! I can start a Wikipedia page on something to do with particle physics, and 300 pages of related topics later, I can finally recurse to the original page and... ah, got it! Cool!
These two share curiosity in common.
You mean like my 256,475 hobbies?
In my case: hypercuriosity -> hyperfixiation -> hypercuriosity -> hyperfixiation.
I also want to add the danger of taking "facts" at face value. I have ADD as do my kids. They are inundated with information I never was and I have to debunk a lot of shit they see online because of the source (manosphere shit is everywhere). Seriously it's an absolute fire hose of bullshit online if you don't know how to filter content.
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