Square Peg, Round Hole Part 1: Productivity
ADHD medication, capitalism, and the question of what I exist to do.
I have started meds for my ADHD and have been given lisdexamfetamine. I’m basically microdosing speed every day1. It works by bringing my dopamine levels to a “normal” baseline, which helps balance out a whole bunch of systems that up to this point didn’t function as they should.
As humans, we rely on dopamine release and uptake every day to do a whole host of things, from brushing our teeth to training for a marathon.
Dopamine is a little misunderstood. Often considered just a feel-good chemical, dopamine gets you off the sofa. We are drip-fed it in small doses to keep us going with a task, and it affects our ability to forecast future dopamine release and keep long-term goals in mind.
ADHD disrupts this reward cycle. In place of a dopamine hit, I experience a sea of racing thoughts, every part of every task I’ve ever wanted to do, all at once. In superhero films, when someone develops telepathy, they can’t shut out the voices; this is how I experience ADHD.
Our ability to use information, start things, get things done, order tasks, and prioritise things is known as our executive function. ADHD wreaks havoc with this, and so you sit there, unable to start anything, until you eventually default to dopamine farming through whatever slot machine mechanism particularly works for you2.
This could be things like gaming, doom scrolling, or worse things like porn, gambling, or substance abuse. Naturally, this gets in the way of your productivity, and productivity is the aim of the game in a capitalist world built around GDP and growth.
Make the Numbers Go Up
Everything in our culture is built around productivity; without it, there can’t be economic growth, and we all kneel at the altar of economic growth. Our media, TV, film, popular stories, our work life, and personal lives are all built around the hustle.
ADHD meds are often framed in this language too, because a critical thing we struggle with is not being able to do things; meds are sold as a way to “be more productive”.
My first two weeks have had me wrestling with this quite a lot.
Am I taking meds to be more productive? Do the meds exist to make me improve my output, per capita? Or am I taking meds so I can enjoy life more?
Lisdexamfetamine is what is called a “pro-drug”. The active element of the drug needs to be “cleaved” from the main molecule before it becomes active, so it only works as fast as my body can metabolise it. This creates a smoother “come up” and “come down”, meaning the curve is more of a pointed triangle rather than a hard shelf3
As a result, I have what can be framed as a peak productivity window. This is often between 10 am and 2 pm, when it’s the strongest.
Without the meds, I feel like an F1 car that hasn’t been put on the tarmac yet with the accelerator pressed to the floor. With the meds, I can often focus on one thing at once. My mind is significantly quieter. I can just…be. Just existing isn’t as torturous an experience. This is a very new experience for me.
It’s easy for me to want to cram everything I’ve ever wanted to do in my life into this tiny window every day. It feels like trying to push a lorry through a manhole.
I experience this as a tension between chasing either productivity or joy. A dialectic between my soul and my material reality. Capitalism forces us to separate these, like oil in water.
If I have 4 good hours every day, where I can finally be free of my ADHD symptoms, who decides how they are spent and who benefits from that time?
The Duality of Capitalism
In Buddhist traditions such as Zen and Advaita, there is the belief in ‘non-duality’. There is no space between the subject and the object, where one begins, the other ends.
Alan Watts famously Westernised this as “we are the universe experiencing itself”. He said that humans are the continuation of the Big Bang, meaning that if the Big Bang was the seed, we are a leaf on the tree that it eventually became.
Capitalism is stubbornly dualist; it needs us to separate our very beings from the universe we are an extension of, from the natural and spiritual world. Capitalism has no interest in nourishing the soul; the soul only exists as a commodity to be ground into dust until it’s just a brand name.
If we believe we are naturally non-dualistic, how can we pillage and plunder the very world that we grew from for a profit? In this context, spending time on soulless, “productive” pursuits becomes akin to chopping off our own umbilical cord.
We are forced to constantly choose between the health of our soul and the health of our material life. Only a lucky few can achieve both. We have to earn to survive, every minute of our life not spent earning isn’t contributing to our material well-being.
Now I’m unburdened from the chaos that is my ADHD, that time suddenly seems incredibly valuable, and our culture has conditioned me to believe it’s best spent on tasks that generate a return.
Experience Alone is Enough
I don’t want to finish every day feeling guilty because I wasn’t “productive enough”.
Every disability, every illness, every mental health crisis, each is just another reason why you can’t contribute to a society that only values your output rather than your existence. Our government doesn’t want you to get better so you can enjoy just being; they want you to get better so you can improve your productive output.
I’m sure I’ll continue to wrestle with this for the rest of my life, and as I move through titration, I am going to try my hardest to make sure at least some of the days are spent at “peak” Lisdex just being.
Maybe I’ll take a book out into the grass and read it in the sun, maybe I’ll take my son to see the ducks, maybe I’ll make some music I never have any intention of anyone ever hearing, or maybe I’ll write something I have no intention of anyone ever reading.
Maybe I can find some time, on some days, to remember that I exist only to exist, nothing more, nothing less. Simply by experiencing this universe, I’ve pulled a winning lottery ticket4, and the Lisdex finally slows everything down enough for me to be present in that.
Medication can either be society’s way to squeeze me tighter into its arbitrary boundaries, or it can be a way for me to experience the world in a more present, calmer, and deliberate way. Capitalism wants the former, my soul needs the latter.
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Street speed and Lisdexamfetamine are obviously very different drugs, that operate in very different ways. But this is a useful, if not reductive, shorthand for understanding how it feels. If you’ve ever taken street speed, especially in large quantities, you might think this is probably an awful way to live, so in this sense, it’s really nothing like street speed. Ironically, my symptoms of ADHD are actually closer to the experience of street speed than Lisdex is.
A hard part of communicating ADHD is that to people without ADHD, this just sounds like bullshit. In a world of self-help books and rugged individualism, people interpret this as “have you just tried harder?”
The other popular drug is methylphenidate, which is NOT a pro-drug. In the States, this goes by the name of “Ritalin” or “Concerta” and is the drug associated with college students pulling all-nighters to study. This gives you the “shelf” experience. You come up fast, stay up, and come down fast.
The privilege inherent in this stance is not lost on me.
Glad to hear that the meds seem to be working for you. Play those drums, write that book, whatever!
Forwarding this to someone I know who has ADHD. An encouraging post.