Foraging

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This is a personal essay on my reflections about ADHD. I wrote this mostly in April 2023 and published in June 2024 with some edits.

intro

It’s 11:55pm on a Sunday. I’m folding my laundry and listening to an audiobook — The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World — to try to keep myself occupied to do my laundry which I’ve procrastinated all week and to learn more about the underlying mechanisms of the brain that lead to distraction.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about work and how to organize my upcoming week while my friend from Ohio is visiting. As the audiobook starts talking about goal interference, I think about how my goal of listening to this audiobook is being interfered by my contemplation about the next week, and then realize, “Hey, this [internal monologue about goal interference] is finally a good way to start this article I’ve wanted to write for months!” So I stop folding my laundry and start writing on my laptop. It’s the second article I’ve started in the same day, adding to the list of twenty articles I’ve been working on. Both my goals of doing laundry and listening to this book were interfered. Oops.¹

“The only problem… if I wasn’t moving forward, I felt like I was going to explode.” — Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless

I’ve always been a huge multitasker, scatterbrained and unfocused. In high school, there’d be lunch periods where I’d be playing rapid chess, doing homework due that day, while eating at a Quiz Bowl practice². In college, I’d watch shows ranging in intensity from The Office to Breaking Bad while oscillating between doing CS homework and reading reddit. In reality, I was probably doing none of these individual tasks particularly well, but sometimes I delude myself into thinking multi-tasking is something I’m good at (I am! Sometimes. I think.)

My friends have often told me that I walk too quickly, that I belong in New York City. But being in NYC always felt too overstimulating, too chaotic, too much of everything, everywhere, all at once.³

During an average 15 minute walk to work, I’ve probably had a dozen internal monologues and sent three slack messages or worked on another unlikely-to-be-published article draft.

Startup life and SF has felt more fun and novel than the eventual monotonous day-to-day of big tech and Seattle I felt after three years, but I always wonder if it’ll last.

Sometimes it’s hard to stop obsessing about moving forward.

For much of my life, discontentment has been my default state and my constant driver. I’d have these cycles of transitory periods, where things felt great after a big accomplishment, new role, a new apartment, new friends, new activities and projects and hobbies and goals, and then it’d all feel flat shortly after.

Three years ago, I learned these traits — this constant drive and discontent and context switching, and a mix of procrastination, focus, presentness, relationship, and work woes — were all somehow related to ADHD, and I started treatment after consulting a specialist and receiving a diagnosis.

For years, I’d been focused on systems, processes, habits, goals, direction, and structure, even pre-diagnosis, as a way of coping. Dozens of productivity apps and YouTube videos and a thousand iterations later, I had something that worked, until it didn’t.

A year ago, I’d switched jobs and homes and a few months later and I was beginning to have those lovely “do better or else here’s the door” conversations.⁴

Both as a means of treatment and my latest obsessive hobby, I began to dive into psychology & neuroscience. After all, doesn’t it seem to make sense to go to the root of all problems — the brain — to address them?

neurology

In this neuroscience rabbit hole, I think I’ve often found more questions than answers.

“If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. Dopamine has no standard for good, and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new, never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is ‘More.’” — Molecule of More, Dr Lieberman

Over time, I’ve learned an oversimplified model is that dopamine is the reinforcement learning (RL) system of the brain, and ADHD typically is linked to some “deficiencies” in this system. Those deficiencies — often dopamine not being retained or released as much as an average person — may manifest in executive dysfunction, disorder, craving, and addiction.

A popular theory⁵ claims that ADHD was evolutionarily advantageous in the past — it encouraged movement, creativity, exploration, exploitation and rewarded it. But in today’s world, there’s often a mismatch between these adaptive traits and the constraints of our modern environment.

Oddly, the diagnosis and subsequent research didn’t seem to provide much solace. If anything, sometimes it felt worse having this internalized identity and deficiency.

foraging

I’ve never been much of a gum chewer, but when I was a kid, I’d pick the sweetest gum, chew it until the flavor was gone, and then quickly discard it.

At the time, I never understood how people could keep chewing their gum long after the flavor was gone, to listen to the same music or watch reruns of the same show over and over. It felt pointless — devoid of utility and novelty.

In The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, the authors talk about this notion of foraging — how we’re constantly foraging for new and novel information and that’s hijacked in today’s modern tech world.

You might think of foraging like a graph traversal, where each node has some resources that can be exploited and depleted. Modern foraging is swiping on TikTok, Tinder, NYTimes, or Amazon. Or walking through Times Square and deciding what to look at and what to eat.

I’ve been really liking this idea of foraging as a metaphor for how dopamine drives the brain — we’re constantly foraging for stimuli, experiences for some expected reward. And for some, there’s a second order process to be able to forage, faster and more efficiently for even more perceived neurological reward.

For much of my life, to keep foraging was more critical to better navigate the world; to push back into going to school after dropping out, to work on academic & social & physical improvement to support myself, to progress faster through a career to better support myself and family.

The need for more has always been a major driver, and boy did it drive. But after the necessity went away — working in arguably the most privileged industry in the world — the fight-or-flight didn’t vanish. Peace didn’t suddenly arrive after Maslow’s hierarchy of needs felt mostly met, lifestyle creep just settled in instead. The pyramid kept growing; the bar kept moving for depression to be satiated.

I feel often like I’m foraging, chasing, driving. And that feels good in a lot of ways — meeting new people, trying new hobbies, learning new things, moving “forward” by some arbitrary measures — but some part of it feels perpetually unsustainable. Some part of it all feels like I’m a slave to attention and dopamine and an uncontrollable motor.

Perhaps the unsustainable part is that skiing not feeling as fun or novel after the twentieth time doesn’t mean you should move on to paragliding, that jumping between six topics in a single conversation or twenty different work tasks in a day doesn’t feel totally sane for those you’re around. Sometimes, the same people and places and experiences you’ve had in your life just don’t feel as meaningful anymore.

Ten jobs, eight cities, dozens of hobbies and projects and goals later, and the fulfillment of work and accomplishment, the novelty of new experiences — it all seems to slowly fade and the law of diminishing returns settles in. It feels like an endless maze, and I’d been turning towards treatment to try to escape it.

moving forward

Some part of me (and a therapist or two) knows that to fixate too much on the pathology and neurology is the wrong path forward. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy — that thinking my brain is wired a certain way makes it further so.

I’ve been trying to worry less about the neurology and dopamine and assume my brain is malleable. Things will be okay, and it’s okay to just live in the now. One of my goals has been to be more fully engrossed in the present, to look beyond utility and towards just experiencing life in front of me.

There’s some balance of foraging and stability, excitement and presentness, and none of these must live in antagonist of the other. Discontentment and anxiety can be useful, but to be fully driven by it isn’t.

Wrapping this article up a year later, procrastinating from doing a different load of laundry, I guess I can say — sometimes it works. Therapy, meditation, medication, exercise, books, and friends help. Foraging isn’t so bad as long as it’s directed towards the right goals.

Maybe this brain isn’t so bad after all. 🙂

footnotes

The intro of this essay is sorta a parody of those old Forbes “A day in the life of [some famous person]” video styles where the narrator has this internal monologue of like “It’s 7am, I wake up and take a cold shower and meditate” routines… but it’s like a dysfunctional and ADHD monologue instead where everything goes not-as-planned despite best efforts. This video by KRAZAM is one of my favorite parodies of these videos.

Often this is referred to as “dopamine stacking”, stacking many different sources of stimulation, which inadvertently increases your dopamine baseline and probably isn’t a good thing if done too much over time. 😛

In Everything, Everywhere, All at Once Michelle Yeoh’s character was written with undiagnosed ADHD. Researching the movie led director Daniel Kwan to his own ADHD realization. The character’s journey is an apt metaphor for a context-switching, threads-pulling, dopaminergic ADHD life.

Waymond: Exactly. I've seen thousands of Evelyns, but never an Evelyn like you. You have so many goals you never finished, dreams you never followed. You're living your worst you. Evelyn: I cannot be the worst. What about the hot dog one? Waymond: No. Can't you see? Every failure here branched off into a success for another Evelyn in another life. Most people only have a few significant alternate life paths so close to them. But you, here, you're capable of anything because you're so bad at everything.

I’m not going to make the claim that ADHD is the cause of my work woes, but it was what prompted me to dig into this rabbit hole more deeply, mostly because it seemed like an effective lever to pull. Generally I think it’s rather hard to decouple this particularly nebulous disorder from your identity, or to pinpoint it as the root cause of anything at all. I also generally was doing a lot of not-so-great things at work: overpromising and underdelivering, being too abrasive and inflexible, and navigating towards my goals poorly. I think this is all maybe somewhat simultaneously related to ADHD, but blame and causation are not worth discussing.

Here’s a great video lecture on this adaptationalist origins view of ADHD by Dr. Russell Barkley.

“In this two part video, I examine the hypothesis that ADHD is not a disorder but is simply a mismatch between modern culture and traits that were adaptive for some reason earlier in human evolution. This adaptationist or mis-match idea argues that cultural evolution proceeded far more quickly than biological evolution such that a trait or set of traits that were once adaptive or helpful to human survival in earlier periods of human evolution have become maladaptive due to changes in culture such that these traits are no longer adaptive. For example, Hartmann’s idea that ADHD represents earlier successful hunters during the hunter-gatherer phase of evolution now forced to live among farmers in contemporary culture. Or Jensen and colleagues’ idea that ADHD represents adaptive traits for warfare during an earlier human epoch that are new at odds with a relatively more peaceful contemporary culture.”

Recommended readings

(Article) Why does everyone know I have ADHD? — Ava

(Book) The Joy of Not Thinking — Tim Grimes

(Book) The Molecule of More — Daniel Z Lieberman & Michael E Long