“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.

Prior to the 1980s, it was known as “hyperkinetic reaction to childhood”. The first medical mention of it was by 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 which sound not so bad so I think we can kind of pick and choose from them, like people who pick and choose Bible verses they like.

Soon after Melchior, 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 which he wrote in 1798. 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 Phillip) 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.

There are a couple different ways to read the data, and the standard reading is (like Autism diagnoses) 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, and screening changes alone doesn't fully account for the diagnosis surge. 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 to 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. Clearly the environment for focus has gotten worse for us all and we're affected more than any other group.

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", attention supply deficiency.

A good explanation of how our steering works comes from Dr. William Dodson, a psychiatrist who’s spent over 25 years treating adult ADHD. He calls it an interest-based nervous system. While a neurotypical brain runs on importance, the ADHD brain responds to interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency. If any given task carries one of those things, we're able to initiate and complete it rapidly. If it carries none, our brains simply will not turn the key and it feels like a brick wall… or a dead car battery.

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 studies 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 nomatic 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 45,000 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. This superpower gene variant for survival got reclassified 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 its 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 is as important as claimed by the researchers above… 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"

*Diagnosed* 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? (I've never met an ADHDer who loved corporations or corporate management)… 1%.

Here are some examples of people who likely had, or were formally diagnosed with, ADHD.

Prior to the internet age it was rarely diagnosed. So, we can only take the characteristics of ADHD and apply them to historical figures.

Historical figures who fit the bill

What he did not mention is that these things perfectly describe Leonardo da Vinci—but that was covered in a 2019 study.

David Neeleman founded five airlines, including JetBlue, and pioneered the e-ticket. He has been formally diagnosed and the psychiatrist’s exit-interview verdict was, 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, 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 sheets. He is the winningest olympian of all time.

Simone Biles confirmed her diagnosis herself publicly after hackers leaked her medical records and 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. ABSOLUTELY DERANGED.

Solange Knowles was diagnosed with ADHD twice because she didn’t believe the first doctor. I cannot think of anything more ADHD than getting a second opinion on your ADHD. She’s also been successful doing lots of different stuff: music, fashion, film and television, performance art and design. Pretty casual.

Greta Gerwig became the first solo female director of a billion-dollar movie (Barbie), then told the press about her adult diagnosis in the most ADHD way possible: “Now, as an adult, I have ADHD — they diagnosed me.” And Tom Holland — Spider-Man himself — 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 decades, Trevor Noah has been open about his diagnosis, and half of stand-up is just an interest-based nervous system with a microphone: notice everything, connect the weird things fast, thrive on the urgency of a live crowd. And over in music, will.i.am, Justin Timberlake, and Justin Bieber are all on record — Timberlake describing his diagnosis as ADD mixed with OCD, Bieber confirming his to GQ — while Dave Grohl wrote in his own essay for The Atlantic that he was “impeded by a raging case of ADD” on his way from Nirvana to the Foo Fighters.

Lewis Hamilton wasn’t diagnosed dyslexic until 17. He spent his whole childhood “always playing catch up,” 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 too. 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, and he became the most decorated Formula 1 driver in history. Noticing a pattern here?

And yes… Bill Gates has said that if he were growing up today, he’d probably be diagnosed too. We’d normally be thrilled to claim a founder of Microsoft, but we’ve gotten more selective about the roster lately: turning up in the Epstein files is not an ADHD trait.

And that’s just the ones alive to confirm it. Go back before the diagnosis existed and the pattern gets almost comical. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents and was kicked out of school because his teachers said he “couldn’t sit still” and was “easily distracted.” Mozart would leap up mid-conversation, do cartwheels, mimic cats, and compose at hyper-speed. Einstein famously lost his keys, forgot to eat, and couldn’t tolerate structured schooling while hyperfocusing on the fabric of the universe. Walt Disney’s biographers describe perpetual daydreaming, impatience, and risk-taking. None of them can be diagnosed from the grave, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the traits were always here. The only thing that’s new is the label. And the paperwork.

Now notice something about this whole list: it’s never just the talent. It’s the pattern. The same person who redefines an entire field somehow cannot do the normal things. Einstein lost his keys. Da Vinci couldn’t finish paid commissions. Grohl’s sixth-grade report card was “unsatisfactory” in basically every category that measures sitting still and turning things in. Neeleman calls himself a terrible employee. Hamilton’s teachers said he’d never amount to anything. The report card and the trophy case come from the same brain. That’s not a coincidence, that’s the signature: an interest-based nervous system runs white-hot where the interest is and simply doesn’t show up where it isn’t. The tragedy is that school, employment, and government paperwork only ever grade the second column.

So: these disabled and deranged people are founding airlines, winning more gold than entire nations at the Olympics, running half the creative economy, and starting companies at six times the base rate. So why did they thrive when the rest of us feel trapped?

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 into the box are not low. 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, nearly nine if they’re women. Read the researchers’ own 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.

Those statistics have faces. Kurt Cobain was prescribed Ritalin for ADHD at seven years old — it’s right there in his biography, alongside everything else: the kid who didn’t fit, the addiction, the depression. Nirvana held both columns of this entire post in one band: Dave Grohl, the raging case of ADD who turned his restlessness into the Foo Fighters, and Kurt, who got the full weight of the cost column. I’m not going to claim ADHD is what killed him; he carried more than any one label explains. But when the researchers talk about “modifiable risk factors and unmet support needs,” his story is the shape of the thing they’re describing.

One more thing before I tell you the plan. According to his first biographer, Leonardo da Vinci died lamenting “that he had offended God and mankind in not having worked at his art as he should have done.” The most celebrated genius in human history spent his final days apologizing for his unfinished projects. The researcher behind the 2019 study said the same thing he sees in his clinic today: bright, intuitive kids who grow into anxious, depressed adults over having “failed to achieve their potential.” Five hundred years apart, same wound: a mind measured against the column it can’t do, instead of the column that changed the world.

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. The maintenance layer. So that’s the whole play; use the machine in its simplest, dumbest, most reliable form, pointed at the one job it deserves: holding the organizational load so the creative human mind doesn’t have to. Structure that just holds, with zero maintenance effort, because a system that requires upkeep from an ADHD brain is a system that will not survive.

And let’s be honest about the size of this: we can’t tear down the prison. Society is going to keep demanding forms, AI is going to make slop emails and bullshit to handle more common, and the attention economy isn’t going to develop a conscience. What we can do is create enough space that we can find more Da Vincis. And if we do our job well enough, we make a dent in those statistics up there i.e. fewer stolen years.

Here’s to the great escape.