About laziness

Let's talk about ADHD + options.

Experts used to believe you could “grow out of” ADHD¹. Online chatter suggests that’s because:

• diagnosis was largely of boys and focused on visible hyperactivity—a symptom that tends to decline (or at least be less obvious) with age, and

• coupled up men manage better than single men—potentially because they’re outsourcing some of their executive dysfunction to their (usually female) partner.

The second point in particular has really captured the Reddit imagination; it dovetails neatly with all those accounts of prolific male authors who got to opt out of domestic drudgery. And there’s undoubtedly some truth to it. Though I expect those men who could find an obliging woman to shoulder their burdens were also probably less hamstrung by some of the most anti-social symptoms to start with.

This has been poking at my brain while I’ve been having a few conversations with friends recently who are exasperated with their other friends. In at least two cases I strongly suspect that Exasperating Friend has ADHD, or something that causes similar executive dysfunction; there are patterns of behaviour that are striking.

In both cases, the word “lazy” has come up, and I can’t blame my pals for thinking so. Laziness and dysfunction look strikingly similar—especially when they’re present in someone who is otherwise able to do things like hold down a job².

I’m no psychologist, but I suspect there’s something else going on. I see a marked difference in how ADHD-style chaos plays out when people have options, and when they don’t. We all get charged the ADHD tax, but some of us have more means to pay it than others. And those that do might be trading away some resilience to stave off burnout.

Let’s take an example: traveling alone to another country.

Imagine you arrive in a busy city and you know that the public transport system is by far the cheapest way of getting to your accommodation. But the system is confusing and unfamiliar—does the ticket for the train also cover the tram? Do you have to validate the ticket before or after boarding? Will there be enough room for your luggage?

You have two options:

1. Buckle down and work it out.

2. Give up and pay over the odds for a cab.

Which one you choose comes down partly to personality, of course. But it also depends on whether you’ve usually had cab money or not. If you have ADHD and you’ve always had cab money, it’s likely started to shift in your mind from a potential option to the preferred one; your friends see princess behaviour, you see a necessity.

There’s also, secretly, another option:

3. You just never travel on your own.

This is, I think, the most likely choice for those who have never had cab money and for whom trying to work it out is exhausting, overstimulating, and ruins their plans for the first afternoon of wandering around. But then when you travel with people, they—justifiably—start wondering what your last servant died of.

Because means aren’t always money. A classic Exasperating Friend theme is always waiting for someone else to do the organising and make the decisions. I strongly suspect Exasperating Friends are more likely to live at home. People—parents, partners, carers, obliging friends, that put-upon wife³—are also a resource that helps us steer around executive dysfunction when we simply can’t go through it.

You know the “Omg you people can’t do anything” meme? Yeah.

It’s a catch-22. Avoid a task for long enough and you eventually lose the ability to do it; get wedged in a valley where the only way out is to trudge uphill and you might just retain the skill—but then collapse at the top.

Now, this is where meds and routines are invaluable, and might well buy you space to get some of those skills back at a noticeably lower cost. The same Reddit crowd who side-eye the man outsourcing executive function to his wife also vocally believe in “taking responsibility” for your conditions, and they are NTA⁴. But there’s a critical caveat: you still have the thing and routines and therapies and meds are not magical; at some point you’re going to let someone down or look lazy, and often there’s nothing you can do about it.

In fact the line that most enrages me, forever trotted out online, is “if they wanted to, they would”. Now this is undeniably true of a man who’s dragging his feet about marrying a woman he’s already had three kids with. But it’s absolutely not true of a friend with ADHD who still hasn’t read, much less replied to, your text from last week, or turns up anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours late every time.

It’s a hard pill to swallow—and you don’t have to! You can stop being friends with them if it’s too much! Exasperating Friends are exasperating!—but their neglect isn’t actually anything to do with a) a moral belief or b) their feelings about you.

Essentially: I simply cannot tell you how many times I wanted to, and I would have, gladly—but I couldn’t. That’s the whole point of this blasted thing.

It’s also hypocritical AF, mind. Those of us with exasperation disease also get annoyed with other people who have it. We also feel rejected and disrespected and, of course, exasperated. And yes, of course it is entirely possible to have ADHD and be a bit crap at the same time. But if you have a friend who just never seems to do anything for themselves and they have ADHD (or you strongly suspect they do), I ask you to reconsider your diagnosis of laziness.

Sometimes what looks like laziness to you is actually a form of accommodation to them, and they just happen to have the means to pay for it—or they’re hoping they haven’t misjudged your willingness to help. If they didn’t, the chances are your friendship would just disintegrate anyway: they’d burn out, or they’d hide from shame, or they’d distance themselves to preserve energy to keep doing the non-negotiable stuff like working to pay their bills.

Will knowing all that help you be less annoyed with them? Maybe yes. Maybe only sometimes. Maybe not at all. Every relationship we have is a one-to-one negotiation, and our boundary lines are drawn in different places for different people. Knowing your Exasperating Friend is just trying to get by with the tools they have might be enough to diffuse your irritation, or it might be the final piece of the puzzle that makes you think “ah, fuck this—I have my own shit to deal with”. You have the right to protect your own peace.

Let me leave you with some little nuggets to consider. Psychiatrist William Dodson has speculated that by the time a child with ADHD—diagnosed or not—reaches their 12th birthday, they might have had 20,000 more pieces of negative feedback than their neurotypical peers. ‘Lazy’ is a common one. Others have looked at the weight of criticism and judgement that ADHD adults carry around their necks like a kettlebell necklace.

We’re at the tip of the iceberg of understanding both the condition and its true prevalence across populations, but in the meantime your diagnosed-or-will-almost-certainly-get-one friends know what you think of them. They hear when you criticise other people for being Exasperating Friends, and wonder if they’ve covered their own habits well enough to stay off thin ice with you. “You’re different though” is a relief in the moment, but a terrifying conditional in the long run: don’t be like other people like you.

It’s okay if you’ve had enough of our shit—we have too. But I promise we’re trying, even when it feels like we’re simply not built to meet the standard.

1. I’ve simplified this massively and I’m not an expert, but there is a decent body of evidence that symptoms are malleable to some extent—ie that some interventions might make it possible to reduce certain symptoms in certain people to the point that they’re sub-clinical. The brain gets less plastic over time, but we can retrain it to some extent, so that makes sense. But it’s deeply nuanced—so please don’t go turning it into the ADHD equivalent of “have you tried yoga?”.

2. No, it’s not a case of controlling it “when we want to”. It’s not an intellectual choice. For everyone except the independently wealthy the pressure of losing a job is more terrifying to the lizard brain than the pressure of losing a friend—so presses that much harder on the dopamine accelerator.

3. Or in my case, heavily relied-upon and incredibly gracious husband.

4. If you don’t spend your time doomscrolling the Reddit Am I The Asshole forums, you are also NTA for not knowing this abbreviation. It’s the judgement that the poster is Not The Asshole in the scenario they’ve described.