I was initially sceptical of the supposed explosion in ADHD diagnoses. It felt like overdiagnosis for a coddled generation.
"Everyone needs an ailment to obsess over, to blame things on, to make themselves feel special," I snorted from my high horse.
Last year I read a book by someone who used their ADHD label as carte blanche for a catalogue of obnoxious behaviours and used therapy-speak as a bludgeon to wallop friends and family with until they were all docile disciples. Nasty work, I thought.
But my perspective shifted when I watched a video where ordinary people discussed their favourite daily objects. These people would never claim to have ADHD, yet, in some aspect of their lives, they all described behaviours rather consistent with it: The need for two screens while eating. The inability to focus on books or maintain a journal. An inability to sit with thoughts whilst queuing at the supermarket.
It finally landed:
ADHD-adjacent behaviours are the new societal baseline. At least among a certain generation.
The French philosopher Paul Virilio predicted this in the 1970s when he wrote about "dromology"—the logic of speed.
He argued that technological acceleration would fundamentally alter human consciousness, creating what he called "the accident of time." We would become unable to experience duration, trapped in perpetual present-moment stimulation.
Virilio was right. We've created the conditions for mass attention deficit.
This isn't about people born with ADHD, or other neurological differences—they still exist on their natural spectrum. It's about everyone else being systematically trained to exhibit similar symptoms.
The shortening of attention spans is rehearsed daily through social media scroll patterns. The need for constant stimulation is reinforced through multi-screen environments. The inability to tolerate boredom is cultivated from childhood when we hand babies iPads to keep them quiet.
T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Four Quartets": "Distracted from distraction by distraction." He was describing the modern condition decades before smartphones existed; the way industrial society fragments consciousness, making sustained attention nearly impossible.
But what Eliot observed in 1943 has become exponentially worse. We've built an entire economy around capturing and monetising human attention. Every app, every platform, every device is optimised to interrupt whatever you were doing and redirect your focus elsewhere.
The result is what we might call "socialised ADHD"—a culture-wide inability to sustain deep attention, to sit with discomfort, to engage in unmediated experience.
Consider the symptoms we've normalised: needing background noise to concentrate, feeling anxious without our phones, unable to read long-form content, requiring constant stimulation to feel engaged.
I admit my equality in this affliction, no longer on my high horse, but on my knees. It is something I wrestle with daily.
But why are we so universally united in this struggle? [Note: those who do not struggle are either enlightened or lost.] These weren't universal human experiences until very recently.
Medieval monks knew that sustained attention was important. They built monasteries with thick walls precisely because they understood that contemplation was fragile.
We've done the opposite. We've built a society that systematically destroys the conditions necessary for sustained thought.
There was a time when the only thing that stopped people from reading was poor literacy or poor eyesight. Even slaves wanted to read. They yearned for such a freedom.
Once, everyone with decent schooling could recite a poem or two from memory. The great philosophers and small children had daily diaries in common. Now we have to read The Artist's Way and watch a dozen YouTube videos to remember how to think again.
The tragedy of our time isn't that more people are being diagnosed with ADHD. The tragedy is that we've created environmental conditions that produce ADHD-like symptoms in nearly everyone, then medicalised the predictable results.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Is there a cleaner way to define what ails us? The thing that keeps us from good work, from quiet time, from peaceful play, from genuine connection? The spiritual emptiness people wrestle with daily?
Perhaps what we're experiencing isn't an epidemic of individual pathology but a collective adaptation to pathological conditions. When the environment demands fragmented attention, fragmented attention becomes the norm.
Does everyone have ADHD now, or have we built a society that requires the fragmentation (and monetisation) of attention? Can you participate in mainstream culture without cannibalising your mind?
