What promotes the symptoms currently grouped under the “ADHD” label? Why has this diagnosis crystallized now rather than earlier?
If the first part explored the spread of the ADHD narrative, this part looks at the world said to sustain it — a world in which attention itself is under pressure.
Some factors stand out:
Anchors and Freedoms: Traditional vs. Modern Societies
Traditions, routines, and strong social ties once acted as quiet cognitive scaffolds. They narrowed possibilities, defined roles, and stabilized the rhythms of effort. Anchors like these structure attention by reducing decision fatigue and maintaining continuity over time. Yet anchoring is double‑edged: what grounds can also confine.
By contrast, high‑freedom environments allow exploration and self‑definition but raise the risk of drift — more choices, fewer guardrails, and constant reorientation. Attention loses friction, and with it, direction.
From Scarcity of Input to Excess of Signal
Earlier contexts offered slower feedback loops and thicker repetition — in this sense, psychic boredom had to be tolerated and worked through. Today’s world, in contrast, delivers a continuous stream of stimulation: infinite novelty, instant social comparison, perpetual connection. The challenge is not lack of input but an overabundance of signals, which dissolves the boundaries that once stabilized focus.
Still, the quality of stimulation matters. Some individuals need richer, more varied, or more meaningful inputs to stay engaged. When tasks feel flat, externally imposed, or disconnected from personal relevance, attention drops. When something feels alive — novel, challenging, resonant — attention sharpens. What gets called a “deficit” often reflects a mismatch between task and person, as the environment fails to supply the conditions under which psychic investment can take root.
Many labeled with “ADHD” can sustain intense hyperfocus when something activates their interest. It’s too simple to call this a global malfunction of attention; more often, it shows how engagement follows meaning.
Dyslexia and the Question of Order
What is labeled “ADHD” is frequently reported to co‑occur with dyslexia. Beyond any proposed neurocognitive overlaps, this pairing points to a deeper theme: difficulty following externally imposed sequences. The issue is often not intelligence or willpower, but a strained relationship with linear order itself — the step‑by‑step logic of tasks, rules, or written text. What is “hard to follow” is also “hard to feel as one’s own.” Seen in this light, some attentional lapses may express not mere distractibility but a protest against meaning imposed from above, or a difficulty in emotional investment in procedures that feel alien. The problem is less “attention” per se than how significance attaches — or fails to attach — to order. This is a clinical hypothesis, not an ontological claim about people.
Generational Asymmetries
Older cohorts often moved within thicker institutional tracks — apprenticeship, stable employment, local communities — that buffered fluctuations in attention. They also encountered a world where effort and reward felt more clearly linked: work hard, buy a home, secure stability.
Younger generations, by contrast, navigate higher volatility, thinner safety nets, and denser cognitive load. They grew up inside screens, under perpetual visibility, and amid fragile futures. The result is a paradoxical exposure: more freedom, but fewer anchors. What older generations call “softness” may reflect not fragility but continuous recalibration under shifting conditions and diminishing returns.
Public life offers fewer predictable rewards than it once did. For many younger adults, stable jobs, housing, and a sense of advancement feel out of reach. In earlier decades, hard work promised upward mobility; now, effort often seems detached from outcome. Meanwhile, social media elevates chance and visibility over persistence: anyone might “make it” overnight by capturing attention. Under such conditions, commitment feels fragile and motivation volatile.
This volatility is easily read as “weakness” or “entitlement,” but it can also be understood as exhaustion and disorientation in a world where direction and meaning are no longer guaranteed. Some respond by withdrawing — lying flat, opting out of competition altogether. Others remain hyperconnected yet internally disconnected, seeking cues for what to desire or value through the endless scroll.
Identity, Desire, and Drift
From a psychoanalytic lens, what is gathered under the “ADHD” label today can reflect not only overstimulation but a diffusion of desire and symbolic anchoring. People often turn to screens, algorithms, and influencers for orientation — outsourcing the task of knowing what is worth wanting. The result is an attention that is both restless and impoverished, hungry for stimulation yet detached from subjective meaning.
Seen this way, what is called “ADHD” is less a “disease” of attention than a symptom of a culture where focus and desire are continually hijacked by external algorithms. The alleged deficit lies not merely in individual brains but in the ecology of meaning that surrounds them. Restoring attention may therefore require more than management strategies — it may demand rebuilding symbolic depth, nurturing curiosity, and re‑anchoring the self in experiences that feel alive rather than algorithmically rewarding.
When the old scripts fray — study, work, advance — motivation becomes short‑term and externally driven. Algorithms increasingly replace mentors; virality increasingly supplants apprenticeship. Social platforms grant unprecedented freedom of expression but also reward imitation and immediate legibility. Distinction once came from going against the norm; now the safest strategy is alignment. As the self conforms to what is trending, it struggles to ask: What do I actually want?
From a psychoanalytic lens, this disconnection from desire is crucial. Restlessness and inattention may signal not merely distraction but a collapse of inner resonance — an attenuation of the words and images through which we locate what matters. When language for the inner world thins, attention loses direction. Desire must be named to be pursued. In its absence, the self delegates orientation to the algorithm, seeking from outside what can no longer be located within.
In Summary
Rather than a disorder, “ADHD” functions as a name that gives shape to a widespread condition of our time. It condenses, in clinical form, the tensions of an era where direction falters, meaning thins, and attention becomes a field of struggle. Its power lies less in describing individuals than in naming something collective — a shared difficulty in sustaining focus, continuity, and desire amid excess stimulation and fragile structure.
We may treat it symptomatically, but to stop there is to mistake the finger for the moon. The phenomenon points beyond itself: toward the cultural ecology that produces it, the ways our environments scatter intention and drain significance. Some meet current diagnostic thresholds; many live adjacent to those criteria. The challenge is not simply to manage symptoms but to rebuild the ecologies — social, linguistic, emotional — through which desire can once again orient attention. Only then can the capacity to focus regain depth, continuity, and purpose.
Through this cultural lens, “ADHD” appears less as an anomaly than as a mirror of our collective condition.
But naming a mirror image is not the same as understanding its meaning. The next part asks: What work does the diagnosis, as a category, actually do? And what might it conceal about the personal, emotional, and unconscious layers beneath the label?