“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 murdered 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.

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

OK let’s fast forward a bit. 1980: The Diagnosis Boom Meets the Distraction Machine

Almost two hundred years later, two things took off at exactly the same time.

Thing one: ADHD went mainstream. In 1980 the DSM-III retired “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood” and gave us “ADD”, the first time the label centered on attention instead of squirming and being some kind of creature of the night.

In 1987 it got its final rebrand to “ADHD”. And then the diagnoses exploded. Through the ’90s and 2000s, stimulant prescriptions climbed year after year. I was personally diagnosed in 2005 with ADD, no H. Today, over one in ten American kids carries the diagnosis, and adult diagnoses are the fastest-growing segment. We went from a medical curiosity to more than 6% of American adults.

Now, there are two ways to read that curve. The standard reading is better awareness and better screening. But notice what else was compounding over those exact same decades.

Thing two: we rebuilt the entire human environment into a machine for shredding attention.

Email arrived and turned every job into paperwork. The cubicle became the default habitat for knowledge work. Then in 2007 we put a slot machine in everyone’s pocket, and an entire trillion-dollar industry (literally named the attention economy) hired the best engineers alive to defeat human focus for ad revenue. The ambient administrative load of simply existing went up an order of magnitude in one generation.

So here’s our reading of the curve: the brains didn’t necessarily change. Forty years is nothing in evolutionary time, nobody’s DNA “caught” ADHD in the ’90s. What changed is that we kept raising the environmental bar for executive function while simultaneously carpet-bombing everyone’s focus, and each year, millions more people fell on the wrong side of the fit. The diagnosis measures the gap, and we’ve spent four decades widening the gap.

There’s a dark irony in here that I can’t stop thinking about. The dark room was Weikard’s cure: remove all stimulation, isolate the patient. Our era did the exact opposite of the cure and the exact opposite of nature at the same time: maximum stimulation, maximum stillness. Sit motionless at a desk for eight hours while a machine designed by Stanford PhDs fires novelty at your dopamine receptors. We built the perfect anti-habitat for this brain. Too boring for the body, too loud for the mind and then acted surprised when the diagnosis rates went vertical.

Which raises the obvious question: if the label keeps growing every time the environment gets worse, maybe we should stop staring at the brains and take a hard look at what we’ve done to the room.

So what does modern science actually say about these brains?

Science time.

“Attention Deficit” implies we don’t have enough attention. Anyone who has watched an ADHD person disappear into a project for nine straight hours, forgetting food, water, and the concept of chairs, knows this is absurd. We don’t have an attention shortage. We have an attention steering difference. The clinical literature increasingly describes it as a problem of attention regulation, not attention supply.

The best explanation I’ve found for how the steering actually works comes from Dr. William Dodson, a psychiatrist who’s spent 25+ years treating adult ADHD. He calls it an interest-based nervous system. Here’s the core of it: a neurotypical brain runs on importance. Tell it something matters i.e. a deadline, consequence, obligation… and it produces the motivation to act. Back in school I tended to act very aggressively the night before papers were due. The ADHD brain doesn’t respond to importance. It responds to interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency. If a task carries one of those, we lock in harder than anyone. If it carries none of them, if it’s merely important, the brain simply will not start. It feels like an invisible brick wall.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Remember my saber-toothed tiger thing from the top? It’s not a joke, it’s a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, and it comes with a gene.

There’s a gene variant called DRD4-7R, associated with novelty-seeking and ADHD traits. Researchers studied the Ariaal people of Kenya. One tribe, with the same genetic stock, split into two groups: some still living as nomadic herders, some recently settled into villages. Among the nomads, the men carrying the ADHD gene variant were better nourished than their peers. Among the settled, the same gene predicted being worse off. Same gene. Same people. The only variable was whether society asked them to roam or to sit still.

So you’re basically a wild animal in a zoo, sorry.

But it goes deeper: genetic analysis suggests this variant was positively selected for starting around 45,000 years ago… meaning it made its carriers more likely to survive. And it shows up most in populations with long histories of migration. The restless, scanning, act-now brain wasn’t a bug in the ancestral environment. It was the job. The guy who noticed everything and couldn’t sit still didn’t have a disorder; he had an important role. Then we invented agriculture, then desks and TurboTax, and the role got reclassified as a diagnosis. In a way, it’s like being unable to function in the world as presented in Wall-E… I think that’s not an insult.

One honest caveat before the pitchforks arrive.

For some people, ADHD is genuinely disabling in any environment, and nothing in this blog post is an argument against medication, therapy, or support. The gene clearly can get out of hand. I am on medication and in therapy as I write this. I’m not interested in trading one dogma for another. But for an enormous number of us, the suffering isn’t coming from the wiring itself.

SO. If that’s true and if this is a specialization and not a malfunction (or mental derangement), then we’d expect to find these brains concentrated wherever the environment actually rewards them. Places with novelty, urgency, challenge, and no one telling you where to point your attention. No paperwork prison.

Let’s check what the deranged have been up to.

Adult ADHD sits somewhere around 6% of the general population on Earth. So if this were purely a malfunction, you’d expect founders and creators to carry it at that rate or lower. Instead: a UCSF-led study of 242 founders found 29% reported ADHD, versus 5% of the comparison group. Nearly six to one.

Zoom out to neurodivergence broadly and the pattern holds. A 2025 study by Understood.org, Havas, and the 4As found 48% of the creative industry’s workforce identifies as neurodivergent. Advertising, marketing, media, the entire imagination business, half of it running on the brains we medicate in fifth grade. Dyslexia tells the same story even louder: Julie Logan at Cass Business School found 35% of US entrepreneurs identified as dyslexic. Corporate managers? 1%.

And let’s take a look behind those statistics. Roll the credits:

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.

The comedy industry is essentially a sheltered workshop for us. Howie Mandel has been one of the loudest voices on adult ADHD for decades, 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 and Justin Timberlake are both on record with Timberlake describing his diagnosis as ADD mixed with OCD.

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.

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.

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.