Meta laid off 5% of employees on Monday, but I missed it because I was at a doctor's appointment. That makes it sound like I had a check-up. I was getting an ADHD screening. I was playing with blocks, trying to remember long lists of words and do math in my head while my colleagues were being unceremoniously kicked off of the internal Facebook, and receiving emails that they were being terminated because of their performance.
That these two things occurred simultaneously is proof that God loves irony. Loyal readers will remember that I too was laid off from Meta in 2023. My internal access was cut off, I received the email to both my work and personal accounts. Because I flew back to the east coast in anticipation, I actually had like an hour to gather stuff off of my virtual desk.
The days after my layoff are foggy. I got lunch with a recently-laid-off friend and tried to recall. I remembered going on a lot of walks. I sent panicked emails to every company I had interviewed for in the past year. At some point, I went back to San Francisco to pack up my apartment. The scars are still with me though, maybe freshly re-opened by the Browser Company of New York. Am I good enough? Can I do this job, like at all?
When the doctor asked why I wanted to be tested for ADHD, I said that I had been laid off and fired, and wanted to know if it was me or just the tech industry. Serious stuff, a last ditch attempt to isolate variables. These things tend to co-occur with absurdity: the doctor was wearing a "Stand With Israel" bracelet. When I looked her up to get directions to the office, I saw that she had a 3 star rating on Google Reviews. One review was from a disgruntled patient, and the other was from her.
Danielle Carr is probably the thinker I trust the most on this stage of amphetamine-capitalism. In Tweaking on Main, she wrote, “By the time ADHD reached quinceañera age, an entire generation of well-insured children had been diagnosed—via tests as rigorous as losing a round of a Chutes & Ladders knockoff called “Stop, Relax and Think”—and put on Adderall, to blockbuster profits.” In the most pejorative sense, and excluding the last bit, this describes my diagnostic experience to a tee.
Excluding the last bit because I don't think there's a world where I consent to amphetamine use. I got the screening, scheduled it months in advance and showed up on time, for information. I want to know if there's a reason for my suffering. I am hesitant to take it further than that. I've already been on SSRIs for the better part of the last decade, and my parents are old world enough to be skeptical of easy pharmacological fixes. Their skepticism is well founded, I think. Danielle has re-tread familiar ground for me about how the DSM-V is probably best understood as the result of a negotiation between drug manufacturers, psychological practitioners, and insurance companies. The DSM-V as a result bears the marks of all those misaligned incentives. This is evident in the fuzziness of disease definitions: depression can cause a person to cry and also lose appetite, but also the exact opposite in another person. So while yes, some millennial women might have had their ADHD go undiagnosed because of more male-centric diagnostic criteria, the absolutely unfathomable scale of proliferation suggests a profit motive. I am sympathetic to Foucault's view that most psychiatry is a tool of social control.
In that article and her interview on Odd Lots, Danielle talks about “punding”, a compulsive performance of repetitive behavior, that is associated with dopamine dysregulation and amphetamine use. Mechanical tasks — fixing powerpoint typos at all hours, programming with stakes and deadlines — are both common to 21st century knowledge work and made infinitely better when they are treated as punding, which is to say, performed under the influence of amphetamines. (There's an interesting side note about Norman Ohler, the historian who has argued that Blitzkrieg cannot be understood without understanding how the Nazis used meth.)
Still, if you're the one Nazi who's not on meth, or the one programmer on your team not gacked to the high heavens on Adderall, you're clearly at a disadvantage. It feels like a race to the bottom, the same way maybe botox does. If tech at least becomes Peter Thiel's Dope Olympics, we may have no choice but to keep up. Lest we get left behind.