"ADHD" and the Paperwork Prison

“ADHD”, or “ADD”, aka “attention deficit disorder”, has been a label we’ve been tinkering with for a few hundred years as humans… in a calm-ish structured society. When we were hunting wild buffalo and getting killed by saber-toothed tigers there wasn’t really a known label for this way of being.

From 1968 to 1980, doctors called it “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood”. The earliest known medical description came in 1775, from a German doctor named Melchior Adam Weikard, who described it as a “lack of attention” disorder characterized by being distractible by anything, even a person’s imagination, taking more effort to complete tasks, carelessness, and general disorganization.

His recommended cures for the “disorder” included removing distractions and leaving a person alone in a dark room… which probably would not have helped Leonardo da Vinci. But he did also recommend “rubbing, cold baths, steel powder, cinchona, mineral waters, horseback riding, and gymnastic exercises.” Some of these sound not so bad, so I’d treat the list like a buffet.

In 1798, 23 years after Weikard, another doctor by the name of Sir Alexander Crichton wrote about this “mental restlessness” in his delightful book An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement. It's been over 200 years and it still gets cited in academic papers.

In the 1800s the big contribution was a picture book. The German doc Heinrich Hoffmann wrote a children’s story about “Fidgety Philip,” a boy who can’t sit still at dinner. For a while, German people called ADHD “Zappelphilipp syndrome.” Then in 1902 Sir George Frederic Still, the father of British pediatrics, decided to describe 43 defiant and unfocused kids with “an abnormal defect of moral control.” Moral control... The Lancet published it.

35 years later in 1937, Dr. Charles Bradley gave amphetamines to a group of children for headaches. The headaches didn’t really improve but some of their schoolwork did so they nicknamed the treatment “arithmetic pills”. His colleagues basically ignored the discovery for 25 years.

Fast forward to 1980: The Diagnosis Boom Meets the Distraction Machine

Forty years or so after Dr. Bradley handed out amphetamines, two things took off at about the same time.

The first thing: ADHD went mainstream in the western world. In 1980 the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition) retired “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood” and updated the name to “ADD” (Attention Deficit Disorder, the thing I was diagnosed with). This was the first time things centered squarely on attention instead of squirming, daydreaming, and being some kind of creature of the night.

A few years later in 1987 ADD got its final rebrand to “ADHD” (H for Hyperactive, just like Fidgety Philip) and the diagnoses began to pick up. Through the ’90s and 2000s, stimulant prescriptions climbed year after year. I was personally diagnosed in 2003 with ADD, no H. Today, over one in ten American kids carry the diagnosis.

You can read the data a couple of ways. The standard reading, as with autism, is better awareness and better screening. But something else was going on in this very same time period.

The second thing: we rebuilt the entire human experience to *require* computers and the internet.

Email arrived, the cubicle became the default habitat for knowledge work, and things were kind of fun on the internet for a bit outside of the whole Pets.com bubble thing. Remember Ebaumsworld? All fun and games. Then in 2007, we started selling a slot machine for dopamine and anxiety in everyone’s pocket. A multi-trillion-dollar industry (literally named the attention economy) hired the best engineers on Earth to capture human attention for ad revenue. Just about everyone opted in.

Here's a Comscore chart that ends in 2016. I think you get what I mean.

Our read is that while correlation is not causation… the brains didn’t change. Forty years is not a lot of time in human evolution. Better screening likely explains a lot of the surge, but maybe not all of it: a 2018 JAMA study (Ra et al.) found that teens who used digital media heavily were more likely to develop ADHD symptoms two years later. We introduced new addictive and stimulating technology, made the barrier to entry cheap, and then we kept raising the environmental bar for executive function while continuing to build industry that crippled it.

Looking back to the beginning of this post remember Weikard’s cure: remove all stimulation and isolate the patient. I challenge anyone with “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood” or "mental restlessness" or "ADHD" to sit at a desk for eight hours a day while using machines designed by Stanford PhDs to fire novelty at your dopamine receptors and simultaneously stay highly capable of boring organizational work. The environment for focus has gotten worse for all of us, and we likely feel it most.

Science time

Attention Deficit vs Steering

“Attention Deficit” implies that we do not have the ability to pay attention, at least not as much as a "normal" person. But everyone who knows an ADHD person knows we can disappear into our hobbies and interests for hours or days, even going so far as to forget drinking water or eating. Usually attention is not the problem, steering is. The clinical literature increasingly describes ADHD as a problem of "attention regulation", not attention supply deficiency.

A popular explanation comes from Dr. William Dodson, a psychiatrist who has spent decades treating adult ADHD. He calls it an interest-based nervous system: while a neurotypical brain runs on importance, the ADHD brain runs on interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency. If a task carries none of those, our brains simply will not turn the key, like a dead car battery. It’s useful shorthand, but it misses half the story. Interest doesn’t explain why the thing you’re excited about next week can’t pull you off the thing you’re locked into right now. That’s attention regulation, the same way emotion regulation works: the hard part is aiming attention and moving it on cue. Weak working memory makes it worse. If you can’t trust your brain to hold your place, switching away feels like losing the thread for good, so you hang on to whatever you’re already doing.

This description of how we function ties into my saber-toothed tiger joke at the top of this post. And as it turns out, we've studied the genetics under the hood.

In the wild

There’s a gene variant called DRD4-7R that's associated with dopamine and novelty-seeking, and it's been linked to ADHD. Researchers trying to understand it studied the Ariaal people of Kenya. This is one tribe with more or less the same genetic stock, but split over time into two groups: one that lives in villages and one that has continued to live as nomadic herders. For the nomads, the men carrying DRD4-7R were far better nourished than those without the gene. Among the village group, the very opposite. Basically the same group and same gene applied in different environments yielded completely different outcomes.

What this means for you (ADHDer) reading this on your phone or computer: you’re basically a wild animal in a zoo, sorry.

Anyway, genetic analysis suggests this variant was positively selected for around 40,000 years ago, meaning it made its carriers more likely to survive. You've probably seen memes online about ADHD people being hunters in a cubicle world and that is actually pretty accurate. The variant also shows up more prominently in populations with long histories of migration or turmoil. Then we invented agriculture, desks, TurboTax, paperwork, and non-survival nonsense tasks. Medicine reclassified this superpower survival gene as a diagnosis. In a way, it’s like being unable to function in the world as presented in Wall-E… and I think that’s not an insult.

One honest caveat before the pitchforks arrive

There are levels to ADHD, and for some people it is genuinely disabling in any modern environment. Nothing in this blog post is an argument against medication, therapy, or getting the support you need. This gene variant clearly can get out of hand. I am on medication and in therapy as I write this. What I am trying to say is that this trait is not what it’s made out to be at least historically and, for an enormous number of us, the suffering isn’t coming from the wiring itself (I see you, happy ADHD gamers).

If environment matters as much as the researchers above claim… let's examine some folks who have made things work in the modern world. Let’s check what "the deranged" have been up to.

The People in the "Right Environment"

Adult ADHD sits somewhere around 6% of the general population on Earth. If this were purely a malfunction and negative trait, you’d expect company founders, creators, and athletes to carry it at that rate or lower. Instead: a UCSF-led study of 242 founders found about 29% reported ADHD, versus 5% of the comparison group. Keep in mind the base rate is almost certainly an undercount: the UCL team below found that *fewer than one in nine adults with ADHD ever actually gets diagnosed.*

If you look at neurodivergence more broadly the pattern holds. A 2025 study by Understood.org, Havas, and the 4As found that nearly *half* the creative industry’s workforce identifies as neurodivergent. That's advertising, marketing, media… the entire imagination and creativity business. Dyslexia tells the same story: Julie Logan at Cass Business School found 35% of US entrepreneurs identified as dyslexic. Corporate managers in the same study? (I've never met an ADHDer who loved corporations or corporate management)… 1%.

People who likely had ADHD

Before the internet age, doctors rarely diagnosed ADHD, so we can only take the characteristics of ADHD and apply them to historical figures.

Historical figures who fit the bill

Leonardo da Vinci: obviously. In a 2019 study, King’s College London researchers read his life like a patient file: thousands of notebook pages and doodles, chronic procrastination, a trail of unfinished paid commissions… a mind that refused to stay in one lane. Their conclusion: textbook ADHD. His reported dying words were “have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” If Leonardo da Vinci says that, maybe we are being a little too hard on ourselves.

Benjamin Franklin: yes, for real. He was a man who loved his dopamine, and he invented American productivity culture: the 13-virtues system, daily schedule, and self-tracking charts. In his autobiography he admits that the one virtue he could never master was order. Aka, organization. “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time” he said. The founding father of the to-do list and man on the $100 bill who loved to invent probably had some version of ADHD.

Winston Churchill: he was constantly late in school and always was losing books and papers, was called “careless”, and he was at the bottom of his class. His housemaster complained that he was so regular in his irregularity that he didn’t know what to do with him. He later wrote 40+ books, drank like a fish, won a Nobel in Literature, and ran a world war on impulsive energy and 4 hours of sleep. 

Thomas Edison: the most prolific inventor in American history. This GOAT had 1,093 patents. The total time he spent in formal school was about 12 weeks as his teacher called him “addled”. He went home, told his mom, and she pulled him out to teach him herself. The system contained the “defective” guy who made the lightbulb practical for three months. He spent the rest of his life running a bunch of chaotic labs, napping on workbenches, and testing thousands of filaments. 

There are many more like John Lennon, whose school reports read “certainly on the road to failure… hopeless… rather a clown in class… wasting other pupils’ time” (the road to failure apparently went through Shea Stadium). Mozart had a habit of leaping up mid-conversation to do cartwheels, mimic cats, and compose at hyperspeed. Einstein lost his keys, had the messiest desk ever, forgot to eat, and couldn’t tolerate structured schooling, but he had some bright ideas about the nature of the universe. Walt Disney’s biographers describe his perpetual daydreaming, constant risk taking, and impatience. No one can diagnose them from the grave, but the traits that now define ADHD are shared by all of these people. What they did not have was a dopamine machine in their pocket loaded with TikTok.

More recent figures who fit the bill

You probably know of some of these…

David Neeleman: he founded five airlines, including JetBlue, and invented the e-ticket. A psychiatrist formally diagnosed him. The psychiatrist’s exit-interview verdict was, and I quote, “Oh, yeah, big time.” (lol). Neeleman’s take on his own brain: “If you give me a magic pill and have it disappear, I would never take the pill. I think I have an advantage over other people.”

Michael Phelps: the winningest Olympian of all time was diagnosed at nine, after a teacher told his mother he’d never be able to focus on anything. He went on to focus his way to 28 Olympic medals, which is more than most countries have. He probably isn’t great at Excel spreadsheets. He has been outspoken in his endorsement of talk therapy (I agree!).

Simone Biles: she confirmed her diagnosis publicly after hackers leaked her medical records. She used the moment to say having ADHD and taking medication for it is nothing to be ashamed of. Then she went back to being the most successful and decorated gymnast in history, male or female. A bit "deranged" indeed.

Greta Gerwig: she became the first solo female director of a billion-dollar movie (Barbie), and then told the press about her adult diagnosis in the most ADHD way possible: “Now, as an adult, I have ADHD — they diagnosed me.” Tom Holland (Spider-Man) keeps it simple: “I have ADHD and I’m dyslexic.”

The comedy industry… is essentially a sheltered workshop for us. Howie Mandel has been one of the loudest voices on adult ADHD for ages, Trevor Noah has been open about his diagnosis (and has done great interviews talking about what ADHD life is really like), and half of stand-up is just an interest-based nervous system with a microphone. They notice everything, connect the weird things fast, and thrive on the urgency of a live crowd. In music, will.i.am, Justin Timberlake, and Justin Bieber are all on the record, pun intended. Timberlake described his diagnosis as ADD mixed with OCD, and Bieber confirmed his to GQ. In a 2020 essay for The Atlantic, “In Defense of Our Teachers,” Dave Grohl wrote that he was “impeded by a raging case of ADD” on his way from Nirvana to the Foo Fighters. He wasn't the only one in Nirvana: Kurt Cobain was diagnosed with ADHD too.

Lewis Hamilton: he was first diagnosed with dyslexia at 17 and spent his whole childhood “always playing catch up". He was bullied, written off by teachers who told him he’d never amount to anything, and recently he’s talked about realizing ADHD is part of his daily life. The school system looked at that kid and saw a problem. Then someone put him in a machine going 200 miles per hour, where he could actually relax. Lewis is the most decorated Formula 1 driver in history.

Noticing a pattern here? The same person who redefines an entire field and is the GOAT at a thing they like doing somehow cannot do the normal things.

Escaping the Paperwork Prison

The majority of us are not placed outside of the normal system of things, in environments where our passions and talents can flourish. We’re not told to follow the urge to break out, we’re told to fit in.

The stakes of fitting in are high. A 2025 study out of UCL, the first of its kind, found that adults diagnosed with ADHD die roughly seven years earlier if they’re men, and nearly nine if they’re women. The researchers’ conclusion about why: probably not the ADHD itself, but “modifiable risk factors and unmet support needs”. The depression, the anxiety, the addiction, the decades of friction with systems that were never built for this way of being.

So. This is what MailSynth is actually about.

Let me be clear about something: we think AI sucks in a lot of ways. But there is exactly one thing this technology is genuinely, boringly great at, and it happens to be the thing that’s been eating us alive: paperwork and organization. So that’s what we use it for, not tricking people into thinking some picture is real when it’s fake. Russell Barkley, who has studied ADHD for over 40 years, gives one main piece of advice: put the information you need outside your head, right where you’ll use it. That’s the job we built MailSynth to do.

We can’t tear down the prison. Society is going to keep demanding forms, AI is going to make slop emails and other junk more common, and the attention economy isn’t going to stop pulling at us. What we can do is try to create enough space. And if we do our job well enough, we make a dent in those statistics up there i.e. fewer stolen years.

We’re not trying to say that everybody is going to turn out to be the next Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Phelps. What we are trying to say is: maybe if you’re not trapped in the paperwork prison, maybe if you’re put in the right environment, you can find out. 

Here’s to finding out, and the great escape.