The Israel strike on Iran was wiped from my mind this morning by a more immediate development, that of the dishwasher repairman coming and fixing the dangling door panel, though he has to get a part to replace the broken spring that causes the door to fall open (and dislodged the door panel in the first place). As always I’m impressed by the quality of the repairmen in this country, they do tend to be better than any others I’ve encountered.
The other thing that this small success wiped from my mind was the podcast I was listening to and am yet to finish, about the use of Adderall, the medicine for treating attention deficit disorder, and recently for increasing productivity. This made me despair for humanity even more than the current situation in the Middle East:
- increasing diagnoses of ADHD
- it’s basically a collection of symptoms, no actual known illness
- the feeling one gets that it’s basically disinterest in the tedium of and dissatisfaction with (modern?) living that’s being treated
- what ‘neuroatypical’ actually means in this context and what ‘normal’ means
- the use of ADHD medicine (amphetamines) for ‘productivity’
- the mechanism by which it does this, ie by making tedious work feel rewarding and something to concentrate on
- the use of these drugs by the people who have basically constructed the world we’re in, where the rewards of social media etc are identical to the rewards of ADHD medicines
I’m only halfway through the podcast so maybe there it takes a turn for the hopeful, but it’s bleak stuff so far.