"I'm medicated for ADHD but it feels like it only works like 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time my eyes just lose focus and I stare blankly at a screen waiting for hours to pass."

Yeah, I'm doing university (I have two more semesters left) and an internship and I feel ya.

"I almost want to take a stab at doing youtube videos and see if I can make a handful of neat projects that get me a sponsor. enough to score a house in a rundown rustbelt town and be able to fuck off and work at my own pace without the impending doom of rent or mortgage staring me down."

Feel that too. I have a YouTube and TikTok channel but it's harder than it looks. And I don't want to do it for the money, I just want to make videos.

But man, so many things to do and so little time, it seems.

I’m confused. Do you have a job in tech? Maybe you just.. don’t like what you went to school for. That happens. Or your associate the work with something negative enough that you don’t like doing it.

I work in tech but I solve enough problems daily that (although minor) I get the dopamine hit to keep going. I also know how to recognize small victories. I too had the burnout problem when trying to build a 3d printer and just let it stay half assembled for an entire year. Then I picked it up again a few weeks ago. I’ll keep working on it today because I don’t want to burn cash on a preassembled printer and I know I can finish it. It’s just time consuming. How I manage burnout won’t be the same for you but you can try switching projects more often instead if grinding out the same one until it’s done. I learn that way that since projects are not worth finishing or at least require me to think about how to continue them for a while. But I usually go back to them to work them out anyway. Because leaving half done projects sucks.

This is me as well. ADHD sucks. Sorry I don't have anything useful to add as comment here

Very relatable. I am not going go be a lot of help because I am someone who looks to be finishing her first actual studies decades after her adulthood officially started, haha. I have so many jobs and unfinished studies under my belt that being a month or so away from finishing an actual thesis feels wild.

Only thing that changed for me is I understood my neurotype, understood how I work. Mostly thanks to my kid who is just like me. So I just try my best to accomodate that, the start-stop style of work and such. The 0 to 100 with nothing in between. I try to work with it as much as I can.

I have no diagnosis, don't think I want one as I am very much of the emansipatory view of neurodiversity and always kind of sucked (pushed back) at masking.

I always did love exercise, the harder the better. I get why now. I don't try to change myself tbh, I try to change my surroundings a lot more. I say no a lot more, I guard my energy more and accept the ebs and flows of my mind as they are. The days when nothing happens I just think of as needed charging days for those hyperfocus days where weeks happen.

I think I also still grieve for exactly what you describe there, the "lost potential" (I hate this framing). But trying to accept that in a society that functions like this one does, I can never reach my "full potential" and that it is not on me. If anything this has radicalized me more, if not for me than for my kid who is living in the same uphill struggle. We need a world built for everyone, not just the majority.

I relate to this post so much

Relatable. It has been an up hill battle to get through uni and sit all my exams, and still now I do what feels like what little I can muster while I'm at work. I'll spend so much time planning to do stuff but never actually getting anywhere. I'm unmedicated, undiagnosed, and the only thing I have that remotely helps is modafinil, but that's a point the barrel and pull the trigger situation where if I am still not 100% distraction free I will hyper focus all my energy into something else completely irrelevant.

Other people can just switch off and distract themselves with games or whatever. I am so jealous of those people. I never get a break. I'm either doing work, or thinking about what work I need to be doing, and I'm so inefficient I still get less done than an equivalent neurotypical. I do all this work just to keep up, and if I could only function properly, with this level of dedication I could become god.

Throughout all uni people would just do their work. My entire life I have complained I have homework to do and people would always respond so just do it if you care about it, like it's that easy. At work I watch people dutifully plod along all day every day and I just... if I have a meeting and it goes on for too long I just will not work for the rest of the day.

Aww man, this speaks to my core.

I'm autistic and I'm pretty sure I have a nasty case of ADHD myself and it's practically made me catatonic. I know I'm more "capable" than my current performance in life suggests, but it's like I lost all passion and will to do anything. I may like the idea of doing something, but I'll tell myself I'll never commit. I'm going to get tested for ADHD sometime soon, and if that's the case I will simply go on meds and as I'm working with a career coach, finally start my life.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I do rather enjoy my work as a software developer (or rather, I don't actively hate doing it), but the impostor complex combined with my typical ADHD lack of ability to get the "boring stuff" out of the way can get pretty rough. The first couple of years or so at my current job was mostly just staring blankly at the screen for (n) hours and feeling like I was doing just barely enough (i.e. 20%-30%), all while panicking because I wanted to make a good impression and keep the job, and being afraid of someone catching on and getting me fired. Apparently I did something right though, because I'm still employed after several rounds of layoffs, and it almost seems like my colleagues are starting to consider me a "senior developer?" I can't say I'm any more efficient these days, and the apparent "job security" makes me a lot less stressed out and worried. Therapy has helped a lot too with getting rid of the impostor thoughts. It might even be that I was always actually good at this job, just the constant thoughts that "I could do more" was fucking me up.

I struggle a lot with the same thing of wanting to do all sorts of other amazing things that I KNOW I'm capable of. I want to make a video game, I want to do more shader programming, I want to reverse engineer proprietary bullshit, but god damn jesus who has the energy for that after work? On the other hand, I also know myself well enough to know that if I quit my job to focus on the aforementioned amazing things, I'd feel the exact same things. "Man I should really be doing that thing right now, I quit my job for this, oh jeez why am I not doing it?" etc etc. That leads me to believe it's less of a problem with my lack of ability, and has more to do with the standards I hold myself to. It's would be quite unsustainable to always work at that 400% efficiency hyperfocus godmode (though it would be nice to be able to tap into it more often), so it's not reasonable of me to have that as the baseline of "doing well" and "being productive". If that makes any sense. I'm still working through this stuff.

As for meds, I take 28mg methylphenidate every morning. Honestly it often feels like it doesn't do anything at all. Though if I don't take it, the executive dysfunction gets turned up to 1000, so I guess it probably does something, it's just very subtle some times. 56mg was way too god damn much and made me all jittery and anxious. Anyway, I think of it less like some magic pill I can take to magically make me neurotypical (which it kind of felt like when I initially started taking it), and more like a slight push in the right direction. Lowers the threshold for my brain machine to go "hey, weren't we supposed to do this other, important thing rn?" rather than just ignoring it and coping with the anxiety with bullshit while the pressure builds and builds and builds. I still have to actually do the thing, but the meds make it a little bit easier to convince myself to at least think about it.

Solidarity with your struggle.

I didn't see if anyone else addressed it. If you adhd meds work 30% of the time that is a sign they work but the treatment protocol needs to be adjusted.

Maybe you need a higher dose. Maybe you need to cheat and drink coffee with it to smooth out curve if dose response. Maybe a diffrent kind of med would work better. Mabe you need an extended release med. Maybe you need regular release meds but you need to take them them so your doses line up with your work schedule. There are graphs about how long drugs stay in your system. As an engineer you might be interested in working with that.