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

[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".