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Focus, and our waning ability to focus, is such a hot topic in our culture today that brain rot was named Oxford's word of the year in 2024. And as those concerns rise, so too do concerns about ADHD. Sometimes it feels like everyone around me has ADHD or something. I don’t think anyone has ever told me, with complete and utter confidence, that no, they don’t have ADHD. (Funnily enough, my coworkers sometimes remark on how crazy they think it is that I don’t listen to music while working, or rawdogging work as they’d call it.) We’ve figured out plenty of short term solutions to combat the attention crisis in our own lives, but we’re going to need to come together as a society if we want to see bigger changes. For now, all we can do for ourselves is become armed with knowledge.

That’s what I was doing the other day before putting up my laundry; I had been reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first major claim this book makes is that multitasking is detrimental to our ability to focus. Our human minds are capable of focusing on one task only. What we think of as multi-tasking is actually rapid switching between tasks, a process that happens so smoothly and effortlessly we don’t consciously register it. If this becomes a well established behavior, it conditions our brain to jump from one thing to the next, making it difficult to dedicate all of our attention to one task, or “monotasking” as this book names it.

Monotasking. I had never heard that term before this book, and I’ve fallen in love with it. So I took the advice to heart one step at a time by dedicating all of my attention to putting up my laundry, something I have a bad habit of procrastinating on.

For several years I’ve been an inveterate believer of embracing silence and boredom, and allowing our minds room to think freely. This book introduced me to a new method of achieving that through monotasking. So, as I paced between my laundry basket and closet, hanging one clothing item at a time, I thought a lot about focus and attention, which soon led me to think of ADHD, which soon led me to think of people who believe they have ADHD, which soon ignited an epiphany.

Years ago, when I was still hopelessly addicted to TikTok, god forbid, there was a rare occasion where I actually absorbed something I learned on there! This Guy here renamed ADHD, and I loved it!
DAVE. Dopamine Attention Variability Executive Dysfunction. (I prefer the acronym DAVED and will be referring to it as such from here on out.) It was perfect! But not perfect enough for me to quit labeling myself as ADHD. Not until the other day when I was putting up my laundry: I remarked in my head just how many people there must be out there who think they have ADHD, when in reality their deficit of attention is a result of years of brain rot fed to them by our chronically distracted mainstream culture. But then I thought about it some more… and I came to a realization! Those people may not have DAVED, the style of brain that we’ve labeled as ADHD, but they absolutely have ADHD! Think about it:

Their attention span has been lobotimized thanks to hyperconsumerist culture that values short term gratification over long term fulfilment.

As a result, they bounce around from stimuli to stimuli just long enough to milk a tiny bit of dopamine out of each, but not one second longer, not long enough to actually absorb anything meaningful.

And! (and this is important) This is not natural! They were not born like this! This state of mind is something that was inflicted upon them as a result of living in our chronically distracted society!

Attention
Deficit
Hyper-activity
Disorder

It’s perfect.

Well! No wonder I never quit labeling myself as ADHD. For the sake of avoiding confusion, from this point onward I will be referring to the style of brain that the world labels as ADHD as DAVED, and the widespread deficit of attention and focus resulting from brain rot as ADHD.

Many are well aware that ADHD diagnoses have been steadily rising in children and adults for the past twenty years. Each source I read presents a slightly different number, but they all agree; it’s going up. But with all this in mind, doesn’t that worry you more than ever? When a man's damaged frontal cortex is diagnosed as a lifelong condition, something out of his control, he’s likely to accept it as just the way things are for him, isn’t he? This is the attitude towards DAVED right now: “It’s never going to go away, so it wouldn’t be wise to try and fight it or grow out of it.” Which is true to an extent. The problem is, we’re also applying this attitude to ADHD, which we need to fundamentally rethink if we want to combat this crisis.

The way I see it, ADHD is mental obesity. Hear me out real quick: How do people get fat?
-Eating low quality food full of crap and devoid of nutrients
-Living a sedentary lifestyle and exercising rarely if at all
No shit, right? Well, what many don’t realize is that our brains have a very similar experience. If your content preferences consist mainly of low quality productions with little to no artistic value, such as social media slop or surface level entertainment like sanitized movies, TV shows and games, you’re not giving your brain the nutrients it needs (metaphorically speaking). If you never challenge your brain to achieve deep thought either through allowing it silence, attempting something new and foreign, researching a topic of interest, creating art, reading, etc, etc, you’re not giving your brain the exercise it needs (Now this I mean in the most literal way possible).

And so, you become mentally fat. Slowly, day by day, each task that isn’t completely effortless and automatic feels harder and harder to accomplish, until you one day find yourself unable to make even the littlest amount of time for the things you love for the sake of devoting it all to easy content. “Well,” The average person is likely to tell themselves, “that’s just being an adult for you.” But those who are more honest with themselves will stare at the man in the mirror and ask them: “What the fuck happened to me? Surely I wasn’t always like this?” Unlike physical obesity, the progression of which you can track with your size and feel in your movement, mental obesity progresses so quietly that we don’t notice it, and is now happening on such a massive scale that we don’t question it. Maybe if our co-workers discussed the latest big title at Barnes & Noble rather than the latest Call of Duty, we’d feel more ashamed of our mental decline.

Now here’s one attitude that absolutely needs to go: In discussions about this style of brain, regardless of whether people are dealing with ADHD or DAVED or both, the act of forcing your mind to get through something it doesn’t care to do and resisting the urge to break away and do something else? Most refer to it as “fighting” your brain, and suggest that you don’t be so mean and unforgiving to yourself. That should sound completely silly to us. Whenever you’re at the gym and you’re pushing yourself real hard, do you consider that “fighting” your body? Of course not. It’s exercise. No shit it hurts, no shit it’s unpleasant! That’s how we come out the other end stronger! How come we don’t apply the same logic to our minds? If you have ADHD in the context of this essay, forcing yourself to do things that you want to push to later, bore you and make you want to pull your precious phone out, or sound interesting but make you feel intimidated at the thought of starting; these actions aren’t combative at all! They’re restorative. Mental exercise is the only way to achieve that elusive short term memory and deep focus that the media wants us to believe only the lucky neurotypicals are truly capable of.

Of course, that’s all easier said than done. Healing our minds won’t ever be as simple as taking a pill (or two, or three), or seeing a therapist, or enrolling in a program or course or class or whatever. It is a years-long journey with no true end. I’ve been on this journey for three years myself and I still cannot confidently call myself fully functional on my bad days. I will say though, I was able to write the last five hundred words of this essay without my primary medication, which is more than what many can do fully medicated. Which is quite sad.

It really comes down not to the life that you want to live now but the life you want to envision yourself living one year, two years, three years from now. Because ADHD isn’t just a disorder; it’s a lifestyle. And it’s a fucking depressing one, isn’t it? It seems I only hear people cite ADHD as the reason they struggle with something. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone brag about how they crushed an exam thanks to ADHD, or that they remember each and every line from their favorite movie thanks to ADHD, or how they’re able to focus on a project for seven hours straight thanks to ADHD. DAVED is a pushing force that guides us to where we’re meant to be. ADHD is a pulling force that drags us down into comfort and complacency.

When we were taught to see ADHD as a disability, we were essentially taught that we were powerless to change it; that a fickle, short-term lifestyle is simply what our brains are built for, and that our deficit of attention isn’t a personal failing or even a choice. As long as we take the right cocktail of pills each morning, keep our brains constantly distracted with cheap dopamine hits when we can and grit our fuckin teeth whenever we can’t, then we’ll be just functional enough to achieve the bare minimum. It doesn’t have to be this way! Many of us must live with DAVED, but no one has to live with ADHD! It’s time to retire self-talk that begins with I can’t, and to push away voices in real life and online that justify complacent living.

If we want to move forward not just as individuals but as a community and as a society that now finds itself struggling with ADHD, then we must put away our pride, step away from our pre-existing beliefs, and ask ourselves: how many of my habits that I believe are a part of my personality are possibly side effects of being chronically unfocused and overstimulated?
Do I have to spend so much time on my phone? Does it really have to hold so much power over me?
Do I need to set alarms for every little thing I have to do throughout the day? Am I really incapable of watching the time on my own?
Do I have to be constantly stimulated throughout the day? Is it really necessary to avoid boredom at all costs?
Do I have to procrastinate so much? Can I really not force myself into action?
Am I actually disabled? Or was I simply tricked by the media into internalizing a victim complex? Maybe my life doesn’t have to be a struggle after all…!

An unhealthy dependence on smart phones is built up of countless skills and abilities that have gone unlearned due to our devices either creating the illusion that they’re unnecessary, or creating an environment where learning is harder than it needs to be. To name a few examples, countless members of Gen-Z cannot, or at least believe we cannot:
-Give directions around the place we’ve lived in our whole lives because Google Maps takes us everywhere.
-Ask someone out on a date face to face because Tinder initiates the process without fear of direct rejection.
-Do simple math problems in our heads because we have a calculator in our pocket at all times.
-Handle cash quickly and efficiently because we make most purchases either digitally or with cards.
-Commit to acts of sustained reading like books, news articles, or scientific studies because we absorb most of our information in short and streamlined bursts.
-Handle being bored and alone with our thoughts because the physical antithesis of boredom is always in our pockets and beckoning at us to look at it some more.
-Cope with being genuinely separated and cut off from a loved one because we are always connected through the internet.

These are just the examples that came to me off the top of my head. I could write several hundred pages more. By themselves, one or two of these unlearned skills might not have a problematic or even noticeable impact on one's ability to be independent and self-serving; It’s when they accumulate over many years of smart phone use that they begin to cripple us. Humans have a well established habit of shooting ourselves in the foot under the illusion that we’re doing ourselves a favor. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Knowing what we know now, it’s tempting to see our phone as a powerful and insidious force of evil that exploits our instincts and weaknesses to make us surrender as much of our time and attention as possible. But as Joey Schweitzer on Youtube reminds us, our phones can’t “Make you do anything. You know, short-form content is inanimate. It can’t make you watch it.” The true brainrot in our society, he argues, is “this parasitic idea that you are not in control over your own actions. It’s this idea that the things that are around you in your environment, inanimate objects, situations, can make you do things that you don’t want to do. That’s just not true.”

While this is an important idea to internalize for the sake of achieving clear focus and deep thinking, it would be irresponsible on my part to overlook the fact that self-discipline and self-neglect are two sides of the same coin; we are our own masters and create our reality for ourselves. Therefore, if we believe we are not our own masters, and that we are not in control over our actions, then we’re not. If you want to escape a fickle ADHD lifestyle, the first and most fundamental step in your journey is to genuinely believe that you can. Don’t assume I’m asking you to completely shift your mindset all at once; If you struggle with poor self-discipline, you don’t have to believe that you are your own master right this second. You just have to believe that you can turn your phone off for thirty minutes, or that you can take the time to cook yourself a proper meal, or that you can read five pages of a book that's collecting dust on your desk, that you can clean your room, do some stretches, take a walk, sit in silence. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your mental function. But if the slow accumulation of bad habits has crippled you, is it not true that the slow accumulation of good habits can set you free?