Totally agree it was a good starting point. I have made a lot of friends in the communities I gained access to via diagnoses and we're still good friends to this day. It's all part of a journey with multiple stages.
Think of it this way: The shape of a hammer compels you to hammer things down with it, but with sustained effort and creativity you can use it for chiseling marble instead.
To reach where I am now, I had to undo some amount of (but not all!) progress I'd made in one direction (since I had bought into the therapy circuit for treating ADHD already) and actively resist attempts to pathologize my own behaviors.
People say "don't treat ADHD like an identity" like it's easy, but the nature of a label compels you to treat it like an identity sometimes. Especially in the society I live in where awareness and destigmatization of conditions is pushed on social media all the time. And especially when your life lacks other meaning and you crave an identity to anchor yourself onto ("just don't make it your identity" sounded like "just don't be depressed" innumerable times to past depressed me, and I saw little reason not to take hold of a new identity for myself). This is a function of depression so I don't blame anyone for it, but I ultimately felt better served by other movements as far as making tangible gains in my mental health.
To use the metaphor again, the art of chiseling was unlikely to make itself known in my current state, but deep down inside I preferred to be there than where I was, so I had to deliberately seek out a teacher and undo the preconceived notions about myself in order to get there. In reality that was just finding another form of therapy that was more effective for solving my problems.
> the label now makes information a keyword search away
I think this can become a double-edged sword in some cases. When applied to certain problems, especially ones with no clear-cut solution, additional knowledge can end up being misleading. (Disclaimer: this is only my experience, and I do not intend to speak for others!)
Example, I always used to frame issues I worked with in the language of ADHD, because I believed that was what best described my pathology. My lack of efficiency at work was an issue of a faulty "executive function". My ability to work uninterrupted for extended periods of time was "hyperfocus". My inability to accept criticism without feeling dejected is an indicator of "rejection sensitive dysphoria".
Yet, after I got therapy that worked for me, I realized three things in short order:
- In my own view, there were no deficits in my executive function. It had been intact the entire time. It was actually uncontrolled stress that was causing my executive function not to operate at its maximum capacity. Hence my problem had not been one of executive function, but of stress relief.
- "Hyperfocus" was merely another way for me of saying "putting sustained attention on an activity to cope with unchecked stress." I no longer consider myself to hyperfocus (which I define as working 3+ hours straight at a time, only stopping for food in between), but at the same time I don't perceive I've lost any of my abilities. On the contrary, I gained the ability to participate in and actually enjoy a wider variety of activities more consistently (cooking, cleaning, socialization, exercise, reading, and many others), as well as start and stop each activity when I please, without losing too much time to activities I only used as a coping mechanism for stress (doomscrolling, social media, etc.). In a sense, my interests became more balanced, even though I still carry the same level of passion for a few niche activities (arguably even stronger for some).
- Criticism does not hurt me as strongly as it did before, when I am aware the criticism is coming from a constructive place and is not merely the feelings of the other party making themselves clear in dramatic fashion. If it's the latter, I now have the ability to ignore the other party and move on. I am now also motivated to avoid going to places where people are likely to criticize me unconstructively. I understood that this was the way to deal with criticism in the past, but I was unable to internalize how to act and feel about criticism until now. Hence, I am no longer dysphoric in this way, if I ever was.
So at least in my view, after I gained a sense of inner peace not having to deal with runaway stress anymore, several problems that I used to see as pathological - having terms such as "executive function" and "dysphoria" - turned out not to be any kind of pathology at all. They were only the aftereffects of excessive daily stress.
In my case, these terms weren't the most helpful for me to understand and work on the real issues underlying my core self, and thus get back a much greater return for the effort I expended - which was much less effort than spending months, years and a lot of money on recurring therapies tailored towards framing my problems in an ADHD-centric way.
Yeah, I get it. It really is exactly how you describe, compared to how I lived before at least - like being on top of the world all the time. No organizational tools or anything required, except maybe a couple calendar reminders for big events each month. No alarm either, now I wake up naturally each day and still get enough time to prepare for work each morning and maybe even watch a bit of TV. (To be fair, I'd probably want to schedule things more often if I had more social obligations to fulfill, but I'm relatively alright working on things by myself right now.)
I did purchase a fitness monitor though, which I found an excellent investment since it provides me with ideas as to how I should spend my energy (exercising or recovery). But it doesn't really impose any "must-do" activities; it only reflects the state of your body day-to-day and leaves the rest to you. I'm already motivated enough to hit the gym for 30 minutes whenever I feel up to it, so it's just an extra thing on top to track my progress.
It's not like every single day is perfect or anything - example, today I fumbled my sleep schedule and couldn't as get much done - but even the off days I can accept with a feeling of grace knowing they're only temporary, and even times like these are necessary in reaching happier places.
No problem! Even if I understand that, in a way, everything I wrote is just nonsense if kept as a jumble of words and not put into practice, I wrote it in such a way that perhaps someone like past me could see relatively easily that there are still solutions out there within reach, even for someone like them. :)
Yeah so that's the thing. In my case, I'll call what I received from my therapy "a self-goodness". I think others may term this nebulous quality "self-esteem", "a deeper understanding of the universe/cosmos/God", "motivation", "confidence", and so on. But "self-goodness" is something I came up with so it resonates with me personally.
In my case, "solving stress" (or perhaps "reaching inner peace" in my own words) meant being capable of enjoying whichever activity I put my mind to, success or failure, and being able to look forward to the future in a generally positive light.
But hold on. This sort of thing I had already read in probably dozens of pithy self-help books for years in the past. It is not knowledge that I nor I'm sure many other people don't already know. And it is repeated in places like here and elsewhere ad infinitum.
What I accomplished was not being made aware of what the solutions out there are, but becoming able to enact such solutions I had heard over and over and over again for years for my benefit, but couldn't, because of what most people would call depression.
But this is only a surface-level answer. Allow me to go deeper still:
The main lesson I learned, and try to put into practice each day now, was that a fulfilling life needs to be experienced, not taught. Basically, it's the difference between watching a video of someone bungee-jumping, and actually bungee-jumping yourself. I think concepts like "qualia" and the "Mary's room" thought experiment are relevant here. A good example of this is talk therapy. In my case at least, talk therapy was ineffective because my therapist had all the experience and was eager to tell me all about it, but because of the limitations of words, she could only impart knowledge to me, and prod me in directions I was unwilling to go in to begin with. That leads to guilt and shame for not living up to the expectations or suggestions of others, and led nowhere.
So beyond an issue as simple as "being depressed" and "going to therapy" to try to solve it, my issue was this: due to limitations of my experience (commonly termed "depression" by most people), I was unable to impart any meaning to the knowledge I did have so that I could put it into practice, and thus gain experience in a way that brought me satisfaction. And I had a lot of knowledge, through endless rumination about how best to deal with my situation that didn't lead to a conclusive answer for a long time. None of that knowledge made me happy or brought results. And with no way to enjoy experience, I had no force driving me to get it for myself.
Okay, so what is to be done about these problems?
That's the thing. Literally nothing I've just told you in the paragraphs above would have put me even one step closer to solving my issues - because I'd heard it all before, for years. In fact, there are entire systems like the authors of self-help books that basically rehash versions of the above treatises in endless different flavours - all of them having little effect except imparting knowledge when the optimal solution would be to impart experience.
This limitation is not the fault of those self-help authors. Because they're only using the tools they know how to use - words. And mere words have their limits. In fact, since my psylocibin therapy I've opened quite a few self-help books and remarked just how much I agree with pretty much everything the authors say - because I have enough experience and knowledge to just agree with them and learn nothing profound. The difference between now and then was my willingness to put such knowledge to use. I am convinced that none of those very self-help books would have ever taught me how to cultivate that willingness with any amount of hard work. My belief is that it is extremely hard or impossible to discipline yourself into gaining this willingness with effort, especially if you are already depressed.
(Aside, this is why I find Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus so fascinating - it mirrors the way I see the world now, by building up an extremely complex system of interlocking rules only to declare all of it nonsense in the end, stating that there are certain things beyond mere words that still hold importance to philosophy.)
No, more fundamentally, what I lacked was this willingness to experience things in life - a sense of "self-goodness". This is the thing that lets one convert knowledge to experience. It's motivation, focus, confidence, ability to just get-up-and-go without being prompted, and so on. I know what this is now, and I didn't have it before. I can now engage it at will pretty much every day and get good results. I did not understand (experientially) such a thing existed before my therapy. It was all new experience to me, even if I had knowledge of what it was supposed to be like by reading books, watching romantic comedies, etc.
So how did I obtain this "self-goodness"?
My whole life, society had told me that reward only comes with hard work. If you don't put in hard work, you don't get results, and are screwed. This reflects poorly on yourself, and you need to try harder. Going to talk therapy was one way of "putting in the hard work", and yet I never got results. It was clear that this way of viewing the world was not helping me.
Instead, what I needed to be taught was that this fundamental "self-goodness" is not an experience that can be earned, or transmitted via talking about what it is logically - it must be given, and for free. Most people I suspect receive this self-goodness in childhood by parents that give unconditional love to them, and there aren't as many problems. I was not so lucky, so I had to obtain this sense elsewhere. In order to gain this sense, I needed an experience that I did not have to work for. I had worked as hard as I could my whole life and it did not amount to inner peace.
So where is this experience to be found?
That's the tricky thing. I can only speak for what worked for me, which is psylocibin therapy with a licensed therapist. Some people have religious awakenings. Some people build networks of friends and gain experience that way. In my own experience, nothing other than the correct drug would have done any good. I had several prescriptions for things like stimulants and SSRIs at the time. I tossed them all away the day after. I say this, but ultimately I do believe the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression carried some validity in my circumstance - insofar as it allowed me to get over what seemed like the impossible hurdle of gaining self-goodness, after which I no longer had to bicker about such theories anymore. There are too many more important things to focus on. Psylocibin promotes neuroplasticity in the correct circumstances, so it may have just been a matter of the proper neurons not being linked up in just the right ways. Sometimes (but not always), I reflect and think that's really all it came down to in the end.
But I can rest assured that such an experience took barely any effort to gain, even though I was trapped in my own web of rules and logic. That was the whole point. There is no virtue in fighting so hard for something you were supposed to have been given for free. That sort of effort makes you look at the people who do have self-goodness act so effortlessly and wonder why they deserve that automatic self-goodness and you don't. I think feelings like those drive a lot of sadness between people in the modern world.
Coming back to "stress", I stopped worrying about it so much once I became occupied so much with fascination with the world around me. In fact, stress stops being something to be "solved", but to be tuned up and down according to one's desires. If I relax too much, I wonder what I'm making of myself and strive to work on a skill or two to fill the time. If I work too hard, I desire more time to myself. So stress becomes a sort of neutral force in the world that accompanies your travels. It reemphasizes how a balance in all things is important to keep in mind, even for issues that you may at first desire to "solve" somehow.
In the end, even my rumination served a purpose. I can now put the sizeable stock of knowledge I gained to good use in earning experience. But now my quantity of knowledge looks so small in hindsight, and makes me realize I have a lot to learn. I am quite excited to learn about new things each day.
Ironically, nowadays I end up agreeing with the self-help authors that "effort is rewarding", with regards to things like exercise, cooking, my job, creative pursuits - in every circumstance except gaining a sense of self-goodness. I think many of those authors never had to deal with trying to cultivate self-goodness from absolute nothingness, and thus have no words to describe what such a process is like, so all they can say is things like "you can do it, I believe in you" and "I don't have anything else to tell you". It is my belief that this single idea is one of the most misunderstood self-help mantras in existence. The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who are served by it the least. And some of those who speak about it at length, even with the best of intentions, will end up talking past a lot of desperate people who need to feel an inner peace for themselves to be able to have any chance at understanding it at all.
To be honest, I thought exactly like you for years. I still benefit from society choosing to label me with something, and that I do not choose to fight. For a while my diagnoses provided so many explanations to my problems and I could live with new purpose.
But a while later, I found it was not enough. I hadn't reached "true happiness" or at least whatever I can call my current state of being. I took a different path, shed all my labels, self-prescribed or otherwise, and am happier than I was before.
I still think I am "different" and have quirks, etc. So in practice, not a whole lot different than before. I just don't use the labels to describe these differences that others might use instead.
I think this only emphasizes that one approach does not necessarily apply when generalized to all people. In my case it only served as one step towards a greater solution, and hopefully even more effective solutions I can build on top of that later.
The same goes for heightened awareness for ADHD. More knowledge can be a blessing (as in your case). At the same time, the population such awareness can serve is shaped like a very complex blob, the form of which nobody truly knows, but I believe some clinicians/promoters see the "blast radius" of promoting awareness as a perfectly round circle overlaid directly onto the population.
My experience also made me realize what one can term "ADHD" may change with overarching cultural shifts or personal growth. I think ADHD should be seen closer to a symptom of a constellation of any number of potentially unrelated causes than a "disorder" to be focused on alone. Unfortunately the established terminology seems to have won out there.
The way we see health conditions and the words we choose to describe them can have profound effects on our understanding of ourselves.
Bit too personal for me to talk about sorry, but the therapy that worked was psybocilin (magic mushrooms) with a licensed counselor. Specifically a dosage of 5g taken in intervals + intensive guidance.
I can say that if I chose to remain too squeamish to ever try the "scheduled drugs" route, my life would have marched onward in an alternate timeline with little to no hope for recovery.
Fair warning, what will write only applies to my circumstance and I have no intention to denigrate the life experiences of others.
I used to prescribe myself labels like ADHD. In fact I probably got into this habit at a very young age since people around me were already talking about labels and how they did or didn't apply to me, and I soaked all this up as children are wont to do.
I no longer abide by such labels anymore and still live comfortably. I discovered that what I called "ADHD" and motivated me to get on the Ritalin/TODO list/5-alarms-a-day train was my method of relieving myself from stress. Distracting myself was my way of coping with stress I found impossible to deal with or even approach at a lower level.
And historically, I had experienced the consequences of not distracting myself firsthand. In the past, when I forced myself take breaks and do literally nothing for a week at a time, I was stressed for what seemed like no reason for every waking hour. The stress would only be relieved when I went back to distracting myself with something (on my computer, at work, etc.). The difference was I was previously unable to recognize the cause of this stress and this address it effectively.
When I was able to address the underlying cause of stress (and this lurked in the background for years or even decades and would not have appeared consciously without heavy-duty and sustained focus), my desire for Facebook-Twitter-HN disappeared overnight. So did my stimulant prescription.
With that, the label "ADHD" disappeared as well. I called myself that a lot over the years. It turns out I was just fighting myself the whole time for seeing myself as "too weak" to deal with being unable to sustain "attention", and targeting my distraction as if it were the ultimate cause, not the symptom it really was. The stress was the real problem, and it remained latent for years without me so much as thinking of it.
On top of being distracted all the time from stress, my belief was if I couldn't stick to a stringent schedule with every minute detail mapped out for each day, I was a failure. Because my impression was that that's the standard you needed to set for yourself to address "ADHD", and if you weren't putting in your reps, your condition would dominate you and you'd live a miserable existence... which made miserable, which only made me believe more strongly in this narrative, and so on in an endless spiral.
I should mention everyone around me also believed in the "disease model" of psychology, so they only served to reinforce these beliefs. I think I renounced this model a bit too strongly in hindsight, as a few of my relationships have been left permanently altered as a result.
Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things. I clean my place on Sunday. That's my only real obligation I've set for myself. Things that "need to be" done somehow get done automatically - because I don't need to pressure myself into doing them, I just want to, and they don't take much time. I no longer feel the need to sweat any of those details or micromanage my own life anymore, and instead just take life as it comes.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that I've never been happier with myself living this way.
A possible answer to your first question, at least how it applies to me: At the intersection of art and technology, I realized recently that the Greater Internet was hampering my progress. By which I mean large public content sharing and delivery services.
Imagine if you try to practice a skill you're bad at like pottery, but all the windows in your house are open and random people you don't know come right up to them and stare at your work at arbitrary times. Even worse, it's nearly always dark outside so you can never tell when they're looking anymore. But sometimes, at unpredictable times, you can hear a fist knocking or a random phrase uttered at you from outside.
Even if you don't know their faces or reactions, or even if they exist at all, you just can't help but believe they're thinking something of you. And logic dictates that even if they don't happen to think something bad of your skill, their positivity is only transient as they're still strangers to you.
That sensation breeds paranoia, and I realized if I wanted to hone an artistic skill I needed to discard the Internet entirely and fiercely protect my individuality at all costs. My artistic muse is not to be given away for free so that people can point and gawk at it; it is far too valuable. There is only one me in the entire world, and they are irreplaceable.
I believe this is one of the main reasons most artists keep their processes a secret. Baring your entire soul for the world all the time is exhausting. What is released publicly is only a highly refined and focused sliver of such a soul, and the rest is tightly protected from prying eyes.
For me, the Internet was a red herring to being an artistic person. "Chock full of all the world's information," you understand, but also chock full of many other inseparable elements that are too stressful to be worth it. Thankfully realizing this means I can cut down my smartphone usage to 10 minutes a day at most; far too many important things to work on instead.
The most I will ever accept from the Internet is practical advice on how to accomplish certain techniques, but the rest I had no choice but to discard to have any hope at improvement and positive well-being. That includes professional critique online. I used to hang on to the belief I needed people on the Internet to judge me so I could improve, even if they were actual teachers, but I realized I could just as easily get private lessons in the real world. I feel a better connection to human instructors than chat threads. And a lot of art involves the perception of the world as it really is, not a virtual counterpart to it.
I did mushrooms quite recently in a highly therapeutic setting. Bar none, it was the only thing that actually addressed my depression after decades of basically everything else. I feel refreshed each day and everything is interesting again for what feels like the first time in my life.
I think if ones perspective of manual art changes, so does that of AI art, sorta like shifting priorities in life. Some priorities are higher than others. And past a certain point, AI art becomes a tempting option beneath a certain motivation level.
If for example you find manual art more fun to practice than AI art, you'd be less inclined to give AI companies money to generate art, since you could perhaps spend hours and hours practicing and have fun.
And of course if you don't find manual art enjoyable, but still don't want to give up on the "art" idea entirely, AI art crosses the threshold into enjoyability, so the end product is at least in front of your eyes.
As for how to learn how to make one type of art more fun than the other, if ones preferences are set in stone, it's pretty tough. The AI/non-art-inclined crowd might invert your quote so the laundry and dishes get prioritized, because different people have different priorities.
Think of it this way: The shape of a hammer compels you to hammer things down with it, but with sustained effort and creativity you can use it for chiseling marble instead.
To reach where I am now, I had to undo some amount of (but not all!) progress I'd made in one direction (since I had bought into the therapy circuit for treating ADHD already) and actively resist attempts to pathologize my own behaviors.
People say "don't treat ADHD like an identity" like it's easy, but the nature of a label compels you to treat it like an identity sometimes. Especially in the society I live in where awareness and destigmatization of conditions is pushed on social media all the time. And especially when your life lacks other meaning and you crave an identity to anchor yourself onto ("just don't make it your identity" sounded like "just don't be depressed" innumerable times to past depressed me, and I saw little reason not to take hold of a new identity for myself). This is a function of depression so I don't blame anyone for it, but I ultimately felt better served by other movements as far as making tangible gains in my mental health.
To use the metaphor again, the art of chiseling was unlikely to make itself known in my current state, but deep down inside I preferred to be there than where I was, so I had to deliberately seek out a teacher and undo the preconceived notions about myself in order to get there. In reality that was just finding another form of therapy that was more effective for solving my problems.