7 ms·
On not noticing rather too many things
- teddyh 3y agoIt’s probably normal to not notice things. <https://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/file-deleted https://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/file-deleted>
- mrsilencedogood 3y agoThis resonated with me somewhat. I think what he describes is my default inclination... I focus very closely, struggle to multitask, etc. Classic ADHD symptoms, though I cope because a) I think my symptoms are relatively mild (though noticeable). I think I could get a diagnosis if I wanted one, but could also probably avoid one if I wanted to. And b) I have the great luck that I can simply "weaponize" my hyperfocus to get work done. I know that in general people can't pick what they hyperfocus on, but I will suggest I don't pick... it's just that I always hyperfocus on coding and coding is my day job. So, quite serendipitous. Thank you Alan Turing, I would be homeless and alone without your inventions. But uh - back to the topic at hand - I also try hard to spend at least some time just being open and perceiving. Looking around for no purpose but to absorb and observe what is there to be absorbed and observed. I think sometimes I take it too far - missing my turn because I was examining the construction off the highway too closely, wondering what that construction worker holding the sign was thinking of to have that curious expression on his face - but I think it's better to overcorrect a little than to not try.
- swatcoder 3y agoFWIW -- You're not wrong that you could probably get a diagnosis if you wanted to, but everything you describe about your experience is relatable to almost everyone. That's exactly how farm workers spend 8 hours picking strawberries, how carpenters spend 8 hours hammering joists, and what everybody is doing when they miss that turn. In a lot of mental health diagnoses, its the persistent inability to "cope" that warrants treatment rather than the little laundry list of symptoms (which are often very common and relatable). Lots of people don't learn that and needlessly feel alien or pathological when actually experiencing a very everyday and relatable sort of life.
- whalesalad 3y agoI haven’t heard it expressed this eloquently and succinct before. Bravo.
- cdogl 3y agoSuperbly well put; I wish I’d learned this earlier in life.
- mrsilencedogood 3y agoAh just to be clear, I don't think I really detailed any of the things I experience that make me suspect I have ADHD. I do struggle a lot sometimes. For instance: The kids need socks so we can leave. I go upstairs. Hmm I want to check how that download is going that definitely doesn't matter at all right now. I check it anyway. Maybe click around a bit. Now I need to pee. What was I up here for? Go downstairs. Wife (rightfully) asks me where tf I've been and why don't I have socks. Etc. Another example: hyperfocusing on something (again, usually programming-related... thinking about a project). Need to do a simple task. Autopilot doing a different task because I'm too busy stuck in my head thinking about the thing. It pays off during interviews, oddly enough - the anxiety and novelty have me super sharp. Same thing during incident response when things are broken. It's the classic executive dysfunction and novelty-seeking stuff. I don't have the hyperactivity symptoms though.
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- Delokoloololo 3y agoI'm not that you have ADHD if you are primarily in your zone. For me ADHD means being physical twitchy and constantly thinking about everything. The zone is the opposite but I never heard someone constantly being in the zone. It's a lot of procrastinating and then hyperfocusing 6h before the deadline
- dhc02 3y agoIn the context of this metaphor, I would describe ADHD as the inability to get into the zone despite desperately wanting to, and the inability to get out of the zone despite desperately trying to. Lots of zone time, very little aimed at the targets you'd prefer.
- runeofdoom 3y agoVery well put. As someone who has been diagnosed and struggled with it all my life, you've captured it really succinctly.
- lvturner 3y agoThe problems for me really began when I was no longer able to get in to any zone -- part of this came with a shift in to more managerial roles and constantly having to split my attention between multiple people and projects. The diagnosis has at a minimum put a lot of context on to large parts of my life and the medication leaves me with some energy left over at the end of the day instead of collapsing like a zombie into the sofa. Still a work in progress.
- JohnMakin 3y agoOne time, at a family gathering, I asked where a relative named Cindy was. The entire room got silent and stared at me. I found out later she'd been dead for a few years and I somehow had not noticed or had forgotten.
- mgdante 3y agoKinda assholes for staring
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoHad they been trying to make him feel bad, maybe. If they were simply shocked, surely not.
- glitchc 3y agoThis sounds like the definition of clueless. Note to OP, not looking to insult you, just that deaths are pretty significant events and deserve notice.
- goles 3y ago“What’d I do? She fuckin’ dead or somethin’?” - Uncle, a six pack deep
- JohnMakin 3y agoLOL, that's almost exactly how it went down
- gardenhedge 3y agoThis is actually a fear of mine. It often makes me hold my tongue because I need to think "should/do I already know this?"
- gs17 3y agoI stopped asking people about family or work unless I already know the answer. I have terrible luck and always end up asking people who just went through tragedy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eloy 3y agoA lot of these things also sounds like autism.
- imp0cat 3y agoJust living in a big city for a long time can do this to you. After a while you just learn to tune most stuff out and engage "autopilot", for a lack of a better word.
- mocha_nate 3y agoZero situational awareness. Completely unaware of the disgust being felt by his date seeing a person defecate. Completely unaware a plant has been in the room for two years. The feeling to post this on the internet with a “lessons learned” theme is kind of naively comical.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoYou mean you think he shouldn't have? I think it's a great post. It describes a noteworthy phenomenon and doesn't much editorialize. The mere fact that some people have verbal internal dialogs and others don't went extremely viral. People care about cognitive differences, and many of the differences we're surrounded by are not obvious. That said, the commenter who describes not remembering that his relative Cindy had died has a pithier story.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago"situational awareness" walking around places like skid row or the tenderloin is exactly not paying attention to the normal (for the area) things going on that aren't a threat, like a guy pooping on the sidewalk
- munificent 3y agoFor what it's worth, this sounds like the opposite of autism to me. People with autism generally have less of a filter for familiar or ignorable stimuli. Where neurotypical people are generally able to tune out things they know or decide to not be relevant, people with autism have less ability to do that, and doing it is more draining for them. If anything, it sounds more like ADHD to me. But armchair diagnosis is always fraught with peril, and the couple of dozen labels in the DSM-V are nowhere near enough to describe the millions of ways that brains can be different.
- lallysingh 3y ago"The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning." - The Wisdom of Life, Arther Shopenhauer. To enjoy life you have to pay attention to it.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoEveryone, 24-7, is paying attention to something. The trick is not to regret the choice.
- swayvil 3y ago>Everyone, 24-7, is paying attention to something Not to nitpick but that ain't necessarily so. In meditation we study attention and do neat tricks with it. One trick is a refinement of plain old concentration. The other trick is breaking the habit of always paying attention to something. That second one is especially neat.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoWhen you meditate you are aware the whole time, right? What do you define as the difference between awareness and attention?
- swayvil 3y agoI guess I'm aware the whole time. I fall into distraction sometimes too tho. I'm not sure exactly what you mean. I use the terms (awareness , attention) synonymously. To put it another way. It's like a flashlight. I shine the beam upon a river of experience-stuff (sights, sounds, thoughts...) When I pay attention to a thing, I direct the beam at that thing. When I concentrate, the beam narrows. When I refrain from all directing and concentrating, the beam widens.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
- whalesalad 3y agoAh yes a casual date thru the tenderloin. These are the types of individuals with no situational awareness that end up getting hurt and wonder why. The world will kill you if you let it.
- alimw 3y agoOn the other hand, if more innocent people lacked the awareness to avoid dodgy areas then they probably wouldn't be so dodgy!
- LAC-Tech 3y agoThey'd be dodgier - a lot more potential victims.
- jacobsenscott 3y agoOn the contrary, even areas of the city considered "dangerous" are mostly not. The media likes to make these places sound like war zones because that sells.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoif you get distracted staring at the guy pooping on the sidewalk then you won't see the guy who's trying to hurt you
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI haven't been there recently so maybe it has gotten more obviously bad, but pre covid at least there were some bars in the tenderloin that were easy to end up walking to without realizing which part of town you are entering.
- strken 3y agoThe tenderloin is really not that dangerous if you don't bother the drug dealers, don't antagonise the crazies, and keep an eye out around you. I lived there for a bit over a year. It's a miserable place for a date and everywhere smells like piss, but two uninvolved walkers are unlikely to be killed in the middle of the street.
- xyzelement 3y agoI think we all have different radars - and also what we perceive consciously and unconsciously differs. For example, my wife has a much keener recognition for something that's messy - a full sink or a shirt laying on the floor of my office will "scream" at her louder that it does at me. Although, I suspect the mess still "affects" me - eg I might be less focused/happy in the messy environment despite not thinking about it consciously. Something completely wild is what my 3 year old sees. A few days ago I was stopped at a red light and he said "daddy, what are all these arrows?" My first response was "what arrows?" Then I saw the arrows on a sign that explained the intersection. Then I saw the arrows on the overhead exit sign. Then I saw the ones drawn on the lanes itself to show which ones can turn and which ones go straight. Then I saw the one-way street sign. Then I saw the red arrow on the traffic light. And probably a bunch more other stuff, including my blinker signal. So at the instant he asked me about arrows, I was consciously aware of 0 arrows, while in reality there were like 12 in our field of view. Now obviously this is because I've been driving for a long time and I don't need to be consciously aware of the arrows to process their information. But it also tells you how much we might omit / filter out because our minds don't think it's worth surfacing to conscious attention.
- befictious 3y agoWhat a pithy example of the human experience. I love this slice of life vignette. I would argue, even better said than the blog post.
- Zancarius 3y agoRather apropos, you explained precisely something I felt when I read your OP's comment (but, humorously, did not consciously notice). I loved it, but couldn't articulate why. It hit too close to home. I pictured driving down the road through town, the "turn only" lane indicators painted on the asphalt, the wash of signage, lights, traffic cones—the background noise of our civilization that provides passive information we've grown so familiar with it fades out of our vision. Thank you both for this! Love it!
- xyzelement 3y ago
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoOnce a friend in grad school made fun of some todo note I had written down, announcing, "Note to self: Love parents." I don't remember what the note was. I do remember laughing. Later I decided she had a point. Not that I didn't love my parents, but that if I spent more time reflecting on my history and particularly my interpersonal relationships, behaviors that came with difficulty would come more naturally.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoBut then did it? Or did the lack of reminders just make you revert to the original problem of needing reminders of things you'd otherwise simply never think of anymore?
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoI didn't respond to her advice by stopping the reminders. Indeed I didn't respond to her advice at all. But a few years later I developed a writing* habit. The deliberate practice of reviewing my experiences seemed to reduce my need for external reminders. (Causality is hard to prove, but they were contemporaneous, and theory suggests they would be related.) * I'm saying writing, not journaling, because I wasn't always writing about my own experience. Even when I wasn't, though, the impulse for the writing probably usually came from those experiences.
- swayvil 3y agoConcentrating your attention (we here are all quite familiar with it) has a flipside. A vast blindness. Because the degree to which you concentrate upon a thing (ex : a puzzle, thoughts about a puzzle, thoughts in general... to name some common ones) is the degree to which you ignore everything else. And this state can be habitual. Which is why brilliant, creative, industrious types are... well, you are familiar with the stereotype.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoThat stereotype applies widely but is not universal. Richard Feynman, for instance, was a good example of a well-adjusted, happy, aware-of-lots-of-stuff hyperfocused creative genius. There are many others. On the order of half of the economics professors I know (at least fifty) seem to me similarly well adjusted, despite all being quite focused.
- glitchc 3y agoThis is mainly a question of attention directed inwards vs outwards. From a biological perspective, situational awareness is what has allowed our species to survive, there's evolutionary pressure. That this behaviour is so prevalent now, given the comments, suggests that our environments have become too safe and human beings are losing this awareness. It also suggests a high degree of narcissism, where my own thoughts are more important than what's happening around me.
- atomicnumber3 3y agoFor the purposes of natural selection, everything that's happened since the Pyramids (and probably several hundred thousand years prior to that) is effectively instantaneous and natural selection/evolution has had no time to "react". If anything, the narrative should be that clearly being inattentive in safe scenarios isn't selected against and thus can't be that detrimental to reproducing successfully.
- glitchc 3y agoThat is certainly very recent, although I agree with your core point, that we are but an instant on an evolutionary timeline. Life has normally been much more dangerous than the past 70 years. We don't know how long it will last either.
- FailMore 3y agoA pleasure to read a post that is what it is and does not try to turn into something grandiose. Thanks
- philsnow 3y agoSome people in this thread have mentioned ADHD, but the latter half of the article could be explained by Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM), which is somewhat correlated with ADHD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Memory_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Memory...
- neilv 3y ago> Last year I was on a date, and, [...] I had not seen this. And some people who are closer to "hyperobservant" in many contexts might've also missed that sight -- because they were in a social context, and focused almost entirely on the conversation with the other person.
- saulpw 3y agoThe City And The City (China Mieville). Two nations, occupying the same physical area, and occupants of either nation have been trained/socialized since birth not to see or interact with the other nation. If they do accidentally, for example with car accident that breaches the psychosocial barrier between them, they must 'unsee' it lest they risk an illegal breach themselves. Sounds like the OP was in the United States of Silicon whereas pooping man was in the Democratic Republic of the Tenderloin. His g/f breached instead of unseeing it like any natural citizen of the US would have done.
- titanomachy 3y agoNow if only Breach would actually whisk away any Tenderloin citizens who threatened or harassed Siliconians… Great book, one of my favorites. Really draws attention to the absurdity of borders and legal status. (I’m not saying we should do away with borders. Just that they carry some weird weird consequences.)
- hoc 3y agoI'd say, whether this is a good or bad thing, will, as always, depend on the environment and what it demands from you. So, in a Darwinian way, the fit(ness) of those two. If this secures your income and your environment is able to fill in for the more attentive parts, you're well set. There are enough possible settings and helpful augmentations in our current society to survive and prosper with any kind of focus/attention distribution. Given they are applied to a somehow matching problem/problem space, this makes up much of this society's success. So the most positive, and therfor naturally sympathetic, aspect of the post might be the happy acceptance of one's own configuration without the need dismiss that of others. While there has always been a tendency of generalist dismissing specialists and vice versa, the insight that we only (or at least much better) progress with the right combination should not be forgotten, even if we feel unsecure or a bit greedy or envious when the opposite talent of ours was a much better fit for a certain situation, or position, again, and got all the praise this time. (Everything else will make you look Dunning-Kruger anyway.)