ADHD output

[azurelunatic]

I was playing clickygames and I was thinking on the nostalgic insistance that modern amusements suppress creative output.

There's some degree of good point there. Time I spend matching little colored blobs doesn't translate into writing, or stone carving, or really any useful pursuit. ADHD brains seek stimulation. The colorful stories and drawings that I might have been making...

A phrase popped into my head: You presume control of the output.

Meaning, that rewind me thirty years, give or take, and contemplate my younger self. My options are limited. How am I entertaining myself?

Here is the big computer. There is the open WordPerfect document. What brilliant thing could I be writing?

On the other side of the screen, I double click and the King of Hearts joins his queen. Cards fly out and bounce. Solitaire.

Or I could be making a picture based packing list for a trip I'll never go on, and spend half the afternoon making sure the sprite representing the pocket squirt gun is pixel-perfect.

Those are vaguely constructive. What if I made a set of really stupid dangerous homemade weapons, including an envenomed dagger and a hazardous kind of taser? That's what good ol' Shawn did. So many bad possibilities. Useless is better than actively counterproductive.

If I make my own fun, pray it's at least as good as useless, not bad in a way that rivals that ass.

Comments

[pauamma]

I hear you. Combine punning with biting sarcasm, add a very sensitive topic like weaponized accusations of child abuse thrown at people entrusted with unsupervised access to them, and you get the one I replied with to a comment in burr86's journal, which was completely on-topic then, but that I wouldn't share anywhere else - and, with ~15 years' hindsight, would be very reluctant to make now if the same opportunity came.

[melannen]

There's this assumption that people didn't waste time with pointless twiddly things before "modern" amusements.

Today, my mom sits in her chairs for a couple hours a day watching TV and playing solitaire on her laptop.

Thirty years ago, her mom sat on her chair for a couple hours a day watching TV and playing solitaire *with actual cards*.

Doing it on the computer is probably slightly worse for her eyes and wrists, but on the other hand, she can set the size better and also the cards aren't grimy and falling apart.

My (probably all non-neurotypical somehow) great-aunts and great-uncles, when they had leisure, organized stamp collections and played with kaleidoscopes and got really good at darts and card tricks.

My grandfather just spent hours a day sitting at his kitchen table, chain-smoking and drinking black coffee and if he got really ambitious, doing toothpick puzzles. Is spending hours a day sorting dots on a screen really worse than that?

[azurelunatic]

Exactly!

[melannen]

My dad could solve any Rubik's Cube in less than five minutes.

[twistedchick]

Along with all that has been said, I find that my brain is happier when I have some dots or shapes to chase around in various colors, along with all the little black bugs that we call letters.

[azurelunatic]

And brain happiness is important.

[silveradept]

Sometimes it's really nice to have many projects going at once, so that when the brain decides it's done with working on one right now, it can be smoothly diverted into working on another one so that it doesn't decide to try and make some different kind of fun for itself.

[azurelunatic]

It's good that the projects are generally much better than some of the possibilities for unsupervised "fun".

[vass]

Sometimes I've tried to use my puzzle-brain self-soothing time to re-teach myself secondary school maths on Khan Academy. And that sometimes even works, but not if I'm too stressed and frustrated to start with.

Lately I've been flitting from Wordle-derivatives to Hades back to Wordle-derivatives. And the dead population of ancient Greece have never been deader.