ADHD

I think you might be missing the true depth of problems modern society has created. We live in atomised family units with walls and fences between us and our neighbours, and very few third places where community can be built. Society doesn't just react to us, it changes us.

It's fairly well documented that simply having someone else present makes an enormous difference in an ADHD person's ability to focus on a task for instance. Plenty of ADHD people will recognise that they can't clean their own house to save their life but they can go all day helping a friend, or with a friend helping them.

I understand that not interrupting people is a thing, but even the character of that behaviour changes fundamentally when you have to self edit in front of an authority figure, and there are so many expectations around how people must defer to a mechanistic existence that surely must change the way that we speak. Even the anxiety that so many neurodivergent people have I think is linked to this. I wonder how much more able to wait to speak you would be if you weren't under this constant atmosphere of domination and control.

We are extremely time poor, and if we had more time to just hang out and tend to one another we would be much more able to learn each other's quirks, be more patient, more able to negotiate a better way of interacting for each person.

The very idea that society is so normative guarantees that some people will be left out because they lack the ability to conform, whatever that looks like, and yet that same society that created these normative conditions refuses to acknowledge its failures in this regard, and it has to brand anyone falling outside of its demands such that they can't live a normal life as "disordered".