Wanna add my 2c here, I feel you strongly. I had a similar path, getting medicated in my 30s and feeling like it destroyed barriers I had been struggling with my entire life. But it has resulted in some negatives as well, like you mentioned.
My hypothesis is that people like myself, and maybe you, have adapted ourselves to being productive with our pre-medication brains. You can only do it at certain times, for short bursts, and in particular ways. It's not really in your "control" how it happens, so you come to terms with doing work when you can. Then, when you become medicated, you don't need to do that anymore. It's exhilarating. You can just work like everyone else does. The problem is that other people have lived their entire lives learning how to balance that kind of drive and we haven't, so we go overboard and grind ourselves down.
Additionally being on the meds all the time can fuck up your sleep. Sleep debt is no joke and the meds get less effective when you're tired ime. I've had memory issues as well and I chalk it up to the sleep debt almost entirely. The obvious answer is to take breaks, but it turns out you need to be able to effectively execute on the weekend too. There aren't that many viable time slots to take a vacation from responsibilities. It's such a faustian bargain and I deeply dislike that we're saddled with this bizarre maladaptation for modern life.
I have a lot of experience with rationalists. What I will say is:
1) If you have a criticism about them or their stupid name or how "'all I know is that I know nothing' how smug of them to say they're truly wise," rest assured they have been self flagellating over these criticisms 100x longer than you've been aware of their group. That doesn't mean they succeeded at addressing the criticisms, of course, but I can tell you that they are self aware. Especially about the stupid name.
2) They are actually well read. They are not sheltered and confused. They are out there doing weird shit together all the time. The kind of off-the-wall life experiences you find in this community will leave you wide eyed.
3) They are genuinely concerned with doing good. You might know about some of the weird, scary, or cringe rationalist groups. You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.
In my experience, where they go astray is when they trick themselves into working beyond their means. The basic underlying idea behind most rationalist projects is something like "think about the way people suffer everyday. How can we think about these problems in a new way? How can we find an answer that actually leaves everyone happy?" A cynic (or a realist, depending on your perspective) might say that there are many problems that fundamentally will leave some group unhappy. The overconfident rationalist will challenge that cynical/realist perspective until they burn themselves out, and in many cases they will attract a whole group of people who burn out alongside them. To consider an extreme case, the Zizians squared this circle by deciding that the majority of human beings didn't have souls and so "leaving everyone happy" was as simple as ignoring the unsouled masses. In less extreme cases this presents itself as hopeless idealism, or a chain of logic that becomes so divorced from normal socialization that it appears to be opaque. "This thought experiment could hypothetically create 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain to exist, so I need to devote my entire existence towards preventing it, because even a 1% chance of that happening is horrible. If you aren't doing the same thing then you are now morally culpable for 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain. You are evil."
Most rationalists are weird but settle into a happy place far from those fringes where they have a diet of "plants and specifically animals without brains that cannot experience pain" and they make $300k annually and donate $200k of it to charitable causes. The super weird ones are annoying to talk to and nobody really likes them.
This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?
This is a huge point I think. I live in metro Seattle as well. I've lived in a few other American cities in my life, all bigger than Seattle, but I've never felt further away from the rest of a city than I have living here. The city is just downright terrible to navigate and the normal kind of urban sprawl that gives a city its "heart" is totally choked by the terrain. I've lived in places where I wouldn't blink at a 30 minute walk to and from a friend's house or a bar, but in Seattle that almost inevitably means hiking up at 45 degree incline for half of the route. Genuinely I don't know what could be done to solve this aside from saturating the city with transit options, but it's in the back of my head whenever I hear people complaining about problems around here. "Why is the traffic so bad?" "Why is housing so expensive?" "Why is everyone sad?" It's because the topography of the city looks like a fucking rollercoaster.
At the risk of blogposting, it's been truly shocking to me over the years to see the reaction people have to stoicism. I naturally found myself stumbling into stoic/CBT-adjacent mental practices after many years of a hard upbringing and it felt like such a natural and helpful truth to me. As someone else in the thread mentioned, the Serenity Prayer encapsulates this mentality well. Then I see the comments here and elsewhere about it being a slave mentality or somehow simultaneously a privilege of the wealthy! I've puzzled over how to square this circle for a long time, and I suspect it's related to some invisible but complex nuance between how different people interpret these experiences.
For me personally I find anger, anguish, lamentation, spite, etc. to be exhausting. I have let these feelings flow freely within myself during some parts of my life and it left me feeling like a husk. I could never relate to the way people say they let anger or spite fuel them, for whatever reason inside my heart they do nothing but siphon my fuel for their own ends. In this way I find stoicism extremely useful for keeping those fuel thieves away from my tank. If something happens that I did not expect, rather than raging at the circumstances, I consider what factors led them to occur and whether or not I could have prevented them. In the vast majority of cases it's never something I could have controlled and I pretty much instantly feel soothed, and if it was then I take it as a lesson to remember and move forward.
What I've gathered is that this approach does nothing for a lot of people and (to put it lightly) comes off as arrogant or dismissive. I assume that the step inbetween there that I mentioned, the part where I feel soothed, does not occur in some others. I can only guess why this is. Conversely my assumption is that those others don't experience that soothing moment and so they imagine I'm just stuffing my feelings down into a pit or that I'm preforming some fantastical Vulcan mindgame with myself where I erase my emotional response entirely.
I wish I had better insight into this difference. It seems to speak to some kind of interesting detail in the way humans interpret our experiences differently, but I feel like I don't even have the language to describe it.
This comment is super relatable. Thanks for sharing your story. I had a similar issue with pneumonia changing me from a gymrat grinding out PRs to someone forcing myself under the bar 3 times a week at best. It makes sense obviously in retrospect but your lung capacity is something everyone absolutely takes for granted. Those first few sessions back in the gym trying to deadlift and then running to the bathroom feeling the urge to puke because I was so winded were terrifying. It definitely humbles you and even if you have the empathy beforehand it really underlines how important it is to remember that people are living completely different lives.
As an aside, did you find anything that was effective for bringing you back to that old level of performance? I've been swallowing the bitter pill that is an enforced cardio regime but man it is really, really not fun to brush up against that bad feeling in your lungs. Speaking of empathy, it's starting to make me understand why people get so obsessed with following snake oil health trends - I've been experimenting with pretty much everything under the sun out of desperation for this one.
Yeah... it's strange. Every partner I've had has been someone very aware (to the point of reading books about it in a few cases) of gender issues and the issues with our social norms. But all of them still followed this same trend. Dealing with their emotions was priced in - I was expected to do it. Dealing with my emotions was too scary, too burdensome, there was always some excuse to recenter it on her instead. And the horrifying thing would be when they bring it up later as ammunition for some petty argument. It gives you the sense that they hear these things and hold them like grudges. It makes you never want to open up ever again.
I hardly post here but I just wanted to say that this is also my experience exactly. Addies were a godsend at first, I was able to succeed at school and dedicated hobbies for the first time in my goddamn life, but after the honeymoon phase (6-8 months) I was struggling with a really bizarre addiction to porn and media. Granted the effects on my grades were still present but it felt like a whole house of cards just waiting to fall apart. It's terrifying because at that point you don't want to trade the small amount of executive control you've gained for anything so experimenting with other medication feels risky. I envy that you were able to go cold turkey off it and still find success in your life, I truly don't feel like I can succeed without the meds but I hate the demon that they've awakened in me.
Don't often comment here but I just wanted to say that I feel you. ADHD was crippling for me my whole life and you really do develop a whole host of weird little layers of protection, either against yourself or against how you expect others to treat you. I'm 36 and got prescribed meds last year and it was a profound experience being able to cast off all the rituals and just... function. It is certainly frustrating to consider what one could have accomplished with this ability at, say, the age of 18 instead... but that way lies madness. At least we can build our future.
My hypothesis is that people like myself, and maybe you, have adapted ourselves to being productive with our pre-medication brains. You can only do it at certain times, for short bursts, and in particular ways. It's not really in your "control" how it happens, so you come to terms with doing work when you can. Then, when you become medicated, you don't need to do that anymore. It's exhilarating. You can just work like everyone else does. The problem is that other people have lived their entire lives learning how to balance that kind of drive and we haven't, so we go overboard and grind ourselves down.
Additionally being on the meds all the time can fuck up your sleep. Sleep debt is no joke and the meds get less effective when you're tired ime. I've had memory issues as well and I chalk it up to the sleep debt almost entirely. The obvious answer is to take breaks, but it turns out you need to be able to effectively execute on the weekend too. There aren't that many viable time slots to take a vacation from responsibilities. It's such a faustian bargain and I deeply dislike that we're saddled with this bizarre maladaptation for modern life.