Personalities
I was recently (if you classify in the last year as “recently”) diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long had a problem with fulfilling project work in my professional life, and hobby-skipped for as long as I can remember. Since getting a diagnosis, I’ve found myself thinking about these different ‘personality quirks’ more often, from the perspective of what advantage they provide to us as a species… sort of a evolutionary psychology perspective.
Having gone through a handful of high-stakes adrenaline-fuelled problems in my life; such as performing first-aid on someone in a road traffic collision, or trying to get a network back online in the middle of the night before regional traffic comes online; I find myself wondering if there’s an advantage to having ADHD in scenarios like this. Many people seem to panic and freeze in scenarios like this, and don’t seem to be of much use at all… but I find that in these types of scenarios, I completely come alive. It’s feels almost as though my life has been on autopilot until a high-adrenaline scenario comes around, and I’m suddenly the main-character in my life again. It’s as if I’ve been playing this game of life half asleep, then suddenly I’m awake and fully alert, paying attention to the tiniest of details… the goal is suddenly crystal clear, and there’s no mental noise at all for a short while.
I find myself wondering if these kinds of ‘personality quirks’ are just part of what it takes for a species to become the dominant species.
Lets ask this question: Where would we be, as a species, if it weren’t for psychopaths? How far back, or forward, would we be if it weren’t for people who had no emotion, no remorse, and no sense of anything aside from “what I can take, I take; what I can do, I do”?
It has me wondering if all these “illnesses” we diagnose amongst the modern populations are actually a ‘necessary evil’ for us to succeed as a race or civlisation. We know that people with ADHD excel in scenarios where there’s a high amout of adrenaline needed, but otherwise can largely not function… maybe our comfort-focussed existence is just not conducive to their usefulness. Whereas if we put them in positions that are adrenaline focussed, they might find themselves excelling beyond ‘normal’ people.
Likewise, I don’t know what role specifically, but I’m sure if we found a use for pschopaths and sociopaths… they’d find their place in society performing roles that they would excel at. It feels as though society has been optimised for the 90%, and the 10% we actually depended upon in high-stakes scenarios to win against our competition have been neglected beyond sense.
I have long yearned for something with more adrenaline, and plan to join the police later this year as a special constable, but financially it doesn’t make any sense to leave my career for the police out right. It seems shame that people who would otherwise excel in a career like this are excluded based on financial reasons. Maybe communism wasn’t such a bad idea afterall…
(I joke. Communism is a terrible idea)
