Okay, I apologize, it’s been a few weeks of weird self-exploration, so I probably owe you a mid-NaNo update. In my previous post, I discussed my enforced recreation period that work requires me to take a few times a year, and jokingly made a few predictions based on my prior November vacations. Namely, that I would be really productive for a while, but once I hit my vacation goal of 20K words, I would start secretly doing day-job stuff and getting distracted by every shiny object around me.
Honestly, I thought it was a joke, but it really is a pattern. When I was at the lodge, I went on an 11-trail hiking challenge in the woods. I know, right? I hate exercise. At the casino resort, I formulated and extensively tested my own system for playing Roulette to see how long I could make $40 last at the table, even though I’m really not a fan of gambling. The point being, once I had met my most minimal writing goals, I lost focus and went to extreme lengths to distract myself with tasks I would never normally do, just to avoid writing, which is something I love doing.
Then a nice gentleman at the bar explained something to me about myself one night, and I’m still not sure how I feel about this, or if I even accept his hasty assessment. See, it turns out, he was a psychologist, and he said the behavior I just described is “textbook ADHD inertia and executive function impairment.” He then proceeded to predict my age, profession, general disposition towards my day job, and a thousand other stupid little details and habits I do every day that are symptomatic of this condition. He wouldn’t “officially diagnose” me without a complete dossier and $150, which is fine. I’ve got my annual seasonal depression scheduled to start up next week. I don’t have time to learn that I’ve been neurodivergent my whole life, but nobody noticed until I got old and cracked Roulette after six Busch Lights and a plate of nachos.
Honestly, I hate shrinks because they do crap like this, and I was about to throw holy water on him and run away, but he pointed me to some really good self-help books on the subject, rather than trying to convert me into a repeat customer of either his practice or a major pharmaceutical company. Let’s face it, you’re not going to be cured by a shrink or a medication any more than you’re going to win money at a casino. The goal is repeat business in all three cases.
Here’s the skinny of what I’ve learned so far, specifically for all of my fellow late-50s tech heads with a creative mind that they use on the side. I already know a few of you who are in my same boat, and we all knew a bunch of people like us back when we were starting out. (We just called them cranky old farts back then, though.) You can stop reading if you freak out at this description, the way I did. The thing is, though, we’ve been like this (ADHD) all our lives, but as we get older, our brains changed what that means.
You see, somewhere in our 40s or 50s, people with an analytical/technical mindset in high-intellect/high-pressure jobs get an automatic “neurchemical firmware update” that we neither requested nor approved. One day, we’re doing our “thing” building software systems, designing networks, and writing compliance documents for work, while writing novels, recording albums, and producing podcasts in our creative downtime. In our 30s, we move between both like a caffeinated wizard. Then suddenly, we get the “update,” and it’s like hitting a wall.
Tell me you haven’t experienced this: You have a work assignment, a hobby, or a project that you really enjoy doing. You know you’re good at it. You’re looking forward to doing it. You know how cool it’s going to be when it’s done. Instead of doing it, however, you circle around it, study it, look at it from five angles, emotionally commit to it, hype yourself up to get going … and for some reason, you go flip on a rerun of some TV show you’ve seen a thousand times and spend the next hour folding your laundry.
Okay, you’re productive. The laundry needed to be put away. It’s just that this is not what you wanted to do. In fact, you hate television, you hate folding laundry even more, and you had this cool thing you wanted to do for work or on the side just now. Weird, but oh well, at least the laundry got done.
It’s fine, until this pattern repeats itself multiple days in a row, then multiple months, and then you no longer recognize yourself. People tell you you’re burned out, you’re depressed, or give you some other quick and simple explanation. The issue is that it only applies to specific projects. You don’t hate your job. You happily polish off your start-of-day tasks and those monthly audits, even though they’re truly mindless and boring. You’re not lacking energy. You’re not lying in bed unable to motivate yourself to get up and face the day. You cleaned out the garage last weekend. You reorganized the kitchen cabinets last night. You’re working on converting your radio streaming software from C# to Java to see if you can get a bit more performance out of it. This is not the behavior of someone who is depressed, or burned out, or unmotivated.
On the other hand, you can’t force yourself to start writing the last four chapters to finish off a novel you wrote two years ago, and you feel like the kids at work are suddenly running circles around you with this YAML crap. Which is weird, since you have 20 years more experience with a dozen languages they’ve never heard of, and all of them were more complex than this stuff. So, you quietly start thinking something’s wrong with you. After all, you’re the oldest person on your team. Heck, you’re older than your boss, and your boss’ boss, and even his boss. These kids just don’t get you used to live for stuff like this. You still do … kinda. Something’s not right, though.
See, that little “firmware update” changed the reward receptors in your brain. Pick a task, unpleasant or not, that you can finish in a few hours and be assured of no surprises — like auditing your server logs, writing a blog post, cleaning the kitchen, meal-prepping the next week of lunches — and you’re golden. Even if it’s boring and you don’t enjoy doing it, your brain got a big-ol dopamine hit from finishing a task, with a bonus dopamine reward because it was something you didn’t even really want to do.
Big tasks though? Tasks that require constant shifting? Tasks you know from experience are going to have the goal posts moved by the powers that be a dozen times and force you to regain momentum or, worse, “start again?” Tasks you know are going to have unforeseen issues halfway through that lead to more and more tasks with no end in sight? Your conscious brain says, “Yeah, bring it on!” What you can’t hear is your subconscious screaming “Noooooooo, anything but going through that thankless, unrewarding crap again! We need some of that happy hormone. Let’s out on an audiobook, clean the bathroom, and pat ourselves on the back for knocking something off the ‘adulting list’ instead.”
Here’s another weird part of it, though. Once you get going on the big, messy tasks, you’re fine. In fact, you’re better than fine. You’re just as fast, competent, creative, and focused as you ever were. That’s the “inertia” part of getting going, or stopping once you are going, where everything collapses. You can’t force yourself to get started anymore. You used to be able to, and pretending you still can, but failing every time, is only making things worse. This isn’t a case of laziness or a lack of skill. This is wiring. This is a shift in how your brain wants to operate. This is not a moral failing. This is not a character flaw. It’s your brain saying, “There’s been a firmware update, and the API calls to engage enthusiasm are going to be different, and poorly documented, from now on.”
Does that sound scarily like you? Apparently, it’s extremely common, almost predictable, in certain professions. I answered a writing prompt back in August about what motivates me. I decided the three big things were “novelty,” “creativity,” and “imagined random reward.” It used to be “learning a new skill for the resume,” “making gobs of money doing something few others can do,” and “getting chicks by the truckload,” but somehow that all kinda faded away about the time I turned 40. Funny thing, my answer was textbook ADHD, I just didn’t know it at the time.
We can easily accept that, at our age, we can’t run a seven-minute mile anymore, we can’t bench our own body weight, we can’t skip dinner two nights in a row in order to lose a quick seven pounds and fit in our skinny pants for our date on Friday. That’s fine … I guess. So, why can’t we accept that our brain can’t do 12-hour focus marathons anymore, it doesn’t get excited about learning yet another friggin’ trendy framework or architecture knowing it will be out of fashion next year, and it doesn’t find joy in pretending it can multitask five things at once and ignoring the fact that all of them got done badly.
Tech types our age, particularly dot-com survivors, were raised on brute-forcing solutions, pulling all-nighters, insane amounts of caffeine, adulation from our superiors, the pride of saying “I’ll just do it myself,” and the certainty that “imposter syndrome is something other people have.” We still think we like those things, but really, we only ever liked the dopamine that those tasks now steadily produce less of compared to the effort we have to put into them to achieve that part.
So, I’m not sure what the answer is, but apparently, it involves a lot of trial-and-error hacks to work around that new control plane that’s firewalling off your enthusiasm. I’ve just started reading the material, but I promise to share any great discoveries and tips here as soon as I find them.
… you know, just in case anybody is curious … or feels similar.
