So I recently became aware of the phenomenon of ADHD memes, which don't seem to have made too much of an impact yet, but they are very much indicative of a broader trend in Internet culture, and one that has existed in various permutations for years. One in which some aspect of mental health is fetishized and meme'd about, to the point where all original meaning is lost.
This in and of itself is part of an even broader trend, in which various mental health issues obtain au courant status. When I was in my early 20s it was various autism spectrum conditions, and referring to anyone you saw as weird as being "on the spectrum" became the standard, and when I was in high school, it was bipolar disorder. All of which seems like so many ways of trying to find a superior metaphor to explain why people are, to use a much simpler term, fucked up.
We could, of course, expand this thesis even further, to more general health issues. One only has to look through an issue of Time or Newsweek in the '90s to find vogues for Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr, more suspicious concepts like multiple chemical sensitivity, and so forth, waves of suspicion and fear that mirrored the purges of the witches during bad harvests in less ostensibly enlightened centuries.
It pretty much goes without saying that the radical expansion in the number of ADHD diagnoses over the past few decades has been controversial. You could point to the fact that Americans are diagnosed with ADHD at an order of magnitude greater than their British counterparts. You could point to the fact that a great many of the DSM criteria for ADHD just seem like indicators of a normal childhood, especially at a point in history when children's lives are as scheduled and routinized and monitored as feedlot cattle. And if you're being a true cynic, you could point to the way that these diagnoses support a vast pharmaceutical enterprise, with legions of confused, lost parents trying to find an easy answer as to why their children are radically failing to conform with the expectations of either themselves or the society at large (although as a bonus, enough of those children were willing to sell me their scrips in college, and a couple of those bad boys crushed up definitely made the Hawkeye Vodka go down a little sweeter, the bitter drip down the back of my throat aside).
These are easy points to make. But when I examine the ADHD memes themselves, they seem -- like memes in general, really -- more indicative of ordinary people trying to make sense of why their lives don't seem to make sense. A couple of the top posts from the r/adhdmemes subreddit...
How much of that actually seems like a diagnosable illness, and how much of that just seems like an apt and even rather banal description of life in the current social and technological moment, and especially of being relatively young in the current social and technological moment?
You have a video playing on your laptop while you check something on your phone. You scroll through Instagram while you eat. You kick yourself for leaving your phone in the living room when you went to go take a shit. Me too.
It's hardly a hot take to say that this is all by design -- we all know that social media is as designed to be addictive as a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos is. And yet we are expected to find individual solutions to a social problem. In much the same way that obesity is treated as an individual problem, despite the fact that in America, people are increasingly forced into patterns of spatial isolation (whether that's an urban food desert or a suburban cul-de-sac), time constraints and job requirements preclude physical exercise, price differences between processed foods and fresh produce of any quality are mortifying, and a Bloomberg-style soda tax is going to do more to punish the poor than actually resolve the profound sickness of our society.
They're both diseases of relative affluence, ADHD and obesity -- as the problem of caloric scarcity has largely been resolved (although malnutrition remains rampant), the problem of entertainment scarcity has largely been resolved.
And yet we still feel unfulfilled -- to continue stretching this metaphor beyond all reason, you don't exactly feel great after you eat a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos -- we still feel the looming threat of boredom at all times.
Before meeting his end in an Inland Empire garage in 2008, David Foster Wallace had spent the past few years trying to finish The Pale King, what was to be his opus about the nature of boredom, set at an IRS branch office in Peoria. It is a near-complete catalog of the myriad tediums and drudgeries of daily life, written by a man who was on his way out the door -- although who knows how much of this novel was written in happier times -- and cobbled together after his death. We should also keep in mind that his magnum opus Infinite Jest revolves around a tape so entertaining it paralyzes the viewer. The resultant thesis becomes that there is nothing more addicting than entertainment (something Wallace alluded to in interviews as well, saying that despite his drug and alcohol problems, TV was the worst addiction he had to face), and that is driven by the cosmic fear of boredom, as boredom requires us to face our own essential loneliness.
And in an era of unprecedented loneliness, and with an equally unprecedented number of available distractions, it seems to logically follow that the ultimate result is a society in which the things that get called ADHD are an inevitable consequence.
But now the time comes to turn the camera inwards.
I don't exhibit any of the classical symptoms. Rather, if anything, I do the opposite, I diligently spend hour after hour reading books and never rereading, watching movies and never rewatching, cooking new dishes, exercising obsessively, studying languages, writing page after page of meaningless crap, making lists of albums to listen to, cocktails to make, restaurants to try, planning voyages I'll never make, as if all this... stuff... will provide some kind of a bulwark. And yet likewise, it doesn't make the tossing and turning as I wake up at 3 a.m. any less painful.
