There’s a youtuber I watch, I won’t mention her cause I don’t want people giving her shit in the comments (not that I think most of you would, but y’know, it’s the Internet) and she’s recently got on this really… anti-tech bend in which she is referring to her enjoyment of cell phone usage as an “addiction”. And while for sure being constantly wired and “on” is harmful, especially doom scrolling twitter, the things she is describing doesn’t sound like addiction to me, but rather ADHD brains seeking dopamine feedback. And honestly? Making broad, sweeping comments like “cell phones are so harmful, and if you can’t just sit still and be present in the moment you have an addiction” is… making me very uncomfortable.
Like, you want me to pay attention to something? Sure, I can do that. For limited amounts of time. You want my sustained attention for hours? Not gonna happen. Unless I’m hyperfixating, nothing is going to hold my attention span for hours on end. And generally speaking, people enjoy the initial upswing of my fixations, but they don’t enjoy the prolonged outcome of me neglecting to self care for eight hours straight because my brain decided this is the only thing I’m going to focus on to the point where I forget to eat, drink, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. So when people tell me they want my undivided attention, I like to tell them they really don’t.
What I can give you however, is a rational amount of attention with the aid of things like stim and fidget toys to keep my brain from wandering for the duration of whatever we’re doing. Sometimes that can even look like scrolling mindlessly on my phone. Speaking personally, most of my attention will be on what you’re saying. I’m just giving my brain background noise to focus on while I actually process what you’re saying/doing.
And you know what? Learning to both do this and accept that I need to do this and I’m not a horrible person for not being able to 100% focus unaided, has been actively helpful and healthful for my mental health. I get fewer ADHD meltdowns, which yeah, can occur with both over stimulation and under stimulation as well.
My brain needs some of that instant gratification because it’s dopamine starved. And what might be a problem for some people, and I genuinely believe it is… Making these sweeping statements about addiction, which is a very serious mental health issue, and making it part of your “I shun technology” spiel you’re on while running a business through YouTube is… not as sincere as you perhaps hope it is. But of course, it’s the shunning of technology as evil, so the comments are just filled with “god, you’re so right, we should all go back to before we had smart technology”, inevitably posted from an iphone with absolutely zero self awareness or sense of irony.
And then when I brought up ADHD and neurodivergency in the discord it was liked I’d just asked “who wants to kick puppies?!” and ended up muting the thread because it was easier to peace out than listen to the whole “you don’t have ADHD, sweety, you’re just highly sensitive” bullshit that is becoming more and more common in these types of groups.
Idk, the whole thing just… rubbed me the wrong way. Especially because the things she were labeling as “signs of addiction”, said in such a scandalized manner, were actually hallmarks of what I now recognize as neurodivergency. And while addiction is a major problem with ADHD—specifically with unmedicated and undiagnosed individuals who have been forced to try and rectify their lack of dopamine on their own—shunning what are honestly harmless coping mechanisms is not going to help those people.
So you check twitter while watching TV. So what? Oh, you checked your phone ten times a day? So what? Is it actively harming you? Is it harming your mental health? Are you doom scrolling? Is it harming those around you? Are you idealizing Instagram too much and putting yourself down? Then yeah, those are bad. Maybe work on that.
But also maybe consider you might just blaming the phone for other problems in your life you’re not addressing cause it’s easier to blame technology than it is to even consider for one second you might have ADHD.
Idk. Thanks for coming to my rambling TED talk. I’m off to read a book while listening to a podcast about a different book.
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