INEP Season 2 No. 1: Attention Deficit Disorder - A Very Little More

So this podcaster should probably let people know why he spent a year not issuing new episodes. The truth is that he doesn't really know. He struggled with whether to keep the podcast going through the year, he then tried writing a blog which ultimately became something of a column in the Times of Israel, and all of the articles from there can still be found in perpetuity. Just search for his name on the website of the newspaper. Two of the articles even got a wide international circulation, but along of course with the greater attention comes all the brutality of the comment section, a place where nobody chimes in to tell you what a good job you're doing. And, the biggest of course of all, along with that brief period of pyrrhic glory he had all manner of his usual ferociously bestial struggles with his unremittingly troubled mental health.

But I suppose the ultimate problem was that the topics he wanted to cover were simply too big to be covered in any half-hour. With every passing week he would get a new grand idea - a series on American literature, a series on Orson Welles, a series on Goethe... lately even as he got the idea to start podcasting again, he thought about doing a long series on the problems of the 'Great Man Theory of History in the Age of MeToo', and doubtless would have courted controversy should anybody have ever listened by also elaborating on continuing and even on newly found strengths of this theory that was already noted as having many problems from the moment when Thomas Carlyle first elucidated it in his 1841 series of lectures: "On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History.

Then he came up with an idea for a new podcast altogether called 'The Museum of Forgotten Music' in which he would comb through music's long and glorious history for those glorious pieces of music that fell through the cracks. He began by making a list of something like 500 neglected composers, some of which are only relatively neglected and some are truly unknown, some contemporary and some from the distant past, some classical and some great composers of other musical genres altogether, and as many as possible of course from those artistic heroes operating on distant continents whose contributions to art are scarcely known in the West, where the life of the artist is at least relatively much easier because there is infinitely more money and resource and political freedom for an artist to pursue his craft. 

But all these projects fell upon the exact same problem: it was just too much work, too much organization, too many dots to connect over too wide a space for a mind that has always worked piecemeal from the fire of spontaneous combustion, or to put it succinctly - too much concentration. The disciplined organization required in such large scale projects are... shall we use a euphemism here... beyond his pay grade. Were he ever able to organize such projects, it would be a telltale sign that the problems which necessitate a podcast like this rather than teaching in a classroom would cease to be present for him. 

This podcaster is not any real intellectual, just an intellectual striver, perhaps even a pseudo intellectual, who perhaps fancies himself gripped by unremitting curiousity, but who pursues his questions by reading little more than a few dozen pages at a time, all too rarely finishing any book, before he embarks upon the next of the thousand books in his apartment or the couple hundred books he's begun listening to online. The fox knows many little things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing - or so this podcaster read Isaiah Berlin write that Aesop once wrote... he still hasn't checked the original Aesop for himself.... If that's the case, then this podcaster is a hyper-fox - perhaps a jackal or a dingo or a dhole; the living, embodied proof that Attention Deficit Disorder truly exists, that condition of which, when he was a child, it was so fashionable to deny its existence, and yet was almost inevitably a telltale indicator in my generation of still larger problems to come when the child reached adolescence and adulthood.



This podcaster desires little more in life than for his impulsive mind to assert autonomy over itself, but as the years go on, the difficulty of such a task seems even more difficult now than it ever did when he was younger. Perhaps he must content himself with the idea that if a troubling thought emerges in his brain, he can trust his natural distractibility will eventually make it go away. And yet, perhaps the reason disturbing thoughts do not leave him is that his natural distractibility is not truly a lack of focus, but is in fact a deeper kind of hyper-focus on those subjects which dictate terms to a mind that simultaneously possesses a bottomless capacity for distractibility yet also a bottomless capacity for obsession?

Perhaps, when the Ritalin generation incurred its first mass-diagnosis, older generations had such trouble believing in the existence of so widespread a condition as Attention Deficit Disorder because the conditions in which brains of their generations formed themselves were so different from our conditions... Perhaps ADD is like depression or diabetes, a condition that once contracted, is lifelong, and requires perpetual management. And perhaps, like with depression, Attention Deficit Disorder requires a trigger, a primary cause that tips a person who already had a genetic predisposition to something like these problems. And in an era of cable television and nascent gaming culture, the capacity for distraction was dozens of times stronger than it was for a generation who grew up on televisions that picked up only three channels. How much more so infinite is the capacity for distractibility in the era of the internet and online gaming? 

...duality/paradox of parenting discipline, can cause  - the benefits and liabilities of stricter parenting.

...further elaboration of duality/paradox of distractibility being both lack of focus and hyper focus.