THE WHITE NOISE. ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER. THE CONSTANT CONCERN.

 

When Albert Camus was writing about Martin Heidegger, Camus put some words to what he thought would catch Heidegger’s thinking. (I do not know if Heidegger himself had written or spoken about those words, but I have a feeling that he had. He almost must have.)

The words were (first in English then in Swedish).

The Constant Concern.
Det ständiga bekymret.

And now I add:

Attention Deficit Disorder.

Why do I write all this? Much of what I do with pen/camera/writing/blogging and other shite comes from ”The Constant Concern”; ADD. It’s like entering the maze, kill the monster, pick up the thread but never ever find the way out. There is no relief. Creativity promises me a cathartic Hard Reset. But the older I get these small pieces I get from Mephistopheles get smaller and smaller.

The quotes below are by Gabor Maté. He catches the grim face of ADD in those words.

The law of entropy rules: order is fleeting, chaos is absolute.

The individual with ADD experiences the mind as a perpetual motion machine. “I have a mind like a butterfly,” a fifty-seven year old woman said. An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, seizes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction, or attention. One experiences an unremitting lack of stillness internally – a constant background static in the brain, a ceaseless “white noise,” as Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey has put it. There is a merciless pressure in one’s mind impelling one on, without necessarily any specific aim or direction. As long ago as 1934 an article in The New England Journal of Medicine identified a distressing driven quality to some people’s lives, which the authors called “organic drivenness.” I, for one, have rarely had a moment’s relaxation without the immediate and troubling feeling that I ought to be doing something else instead. Like father like son. At the age of eight or nine my son said to me once that “I always think I should be doing something but I don’t know what it is.” The oldest person to whom I have prescribed a stimulant was an eightyfive year old woman who, on taking Ritalin, was able to sit still more than fifteen minutes for what was literally the very first time in her life.

A ceaseless “White Noise”. I’m Never at Home.