There's a theory that many types of neurodivergence, particularly but not exclusively ADHD, are actually just adaptations that helped early humans function better in hunter + gatherer societies.
The rationale goes, who would be better suited to hunt for game and forage for fruits and vegetables than someone who has both a deep, focused attention to detail and is easily distracted, who can run for long periods but also interconnect ideas and spot patterns.
This idea was first proposed in 1993 by Thom Hartmann in his book, "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception" in which he explained what he was learning about ADHD to support his son with his diagnosis. While he says clearly in the book that it isn't intended to be hard science, it has actually been taken on and researched further by multiple experts.
The core idea is that ADHD is not a negative adaptation. It was actually a distinct set of advantages in nomadic, hunter gatherer societies, that became maladaptive in agrarian and industrial societies.
Basically, neurodivergent people aren't poorly suited for what humans are supposed to be doing - they're poorly suited for what humans are doing instead of what we've always done.
In further research on this hypothesis, I found these examples:
- Glickman & Dodd (1998) found that adults with self-reported ADHD scored higher than other adults on self-reported ability to hyper-focus on "urgent tasks", such as last-minute projects or preparations. Adults in the ADHD group were uniquely able to postpone eating, sleeping and other personal needs and stay absorbed in the "urgent task" for an extended time.
- According to evolutionary anthropologist Ben Campbell of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, studies of the Ariaal, an isolated nomadic group in Kenya, suggest that hyperactivity and impulsivity—key traits of ADHD—have distinct advantages to nomadic people. Additionally, nomadic Ariaal have high rates of a genetic mutation linked to ADHD, while more settled Ariaal populations have lower rates of this mutation.
Basically, there is some evidence that the way we as neurodivergent individuals - specifically but not exclusively ADHD individuals - see the world was beneficial in our distant past, and is only disabling now because we're so far removed from our nature as human beings.
So of course, as a neurodivergent person would on discovering this information, I dug deeper. And deeper. And deeper.
I wanted to learn what hunter gatherer societies actually looked and functioned like, how we can learn from them, and how we can possibly use some of their model of life and work to benefit us in our work today. Here. In an obvious knowledge economy, far removed from nomadic tribes foraging for native plant species and hunting game.
What I found was depressing, obvious, and incredibly useful.
So, let's start.
While we don't have a lot of written records from hunter gatherer societies available to us, unfortunately, there are still some societies like this living today. Often small and isolated, anthropologists will visit and live with them for some time to learn their ways. While there's a lot of colonialism and racism to unpack there, and it holds a strong resemblance to missionary work in terms of it's negative impact, it has taught us some valuable things about what life may have been like for earlier hunter gatherer societies.
And while it's often imagined as a short, difficult existence where community members struggle to get enough food to survive and are struck down easily by disease... The reality observed here is a much different picture.
In reality, even in some very difficult environments, many of the communities observed are able to eat a variety of nutrients from 2k+ calories of food each and every day - all from a combination of foraging and hunting game.
While they'll quickly tell you that food is their primary concern and struggle, it's not a constant source of 40+ hour workweeks just to survive.
While that way of living is often compared in contrast to agrarian living (farming societies) as difficult and primitive, in reality, what we know about the transition to agrarian living and then industrial living was that it has slowly created worse and worse conditions for the majority of living humans across many metrics while concentrating health and happiness in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
A brief history of work.
Based on what we know and what I was able to uncover on the history of "work" as we know it, the hunter gatherer societies of millennia ago (pre-dating about 7,000 years) and the modern ones that still exist today had a very different culture about work than we do.
The most interesting thing was, they didn't view it as a separate thing.
Work was life and life was work.
They didn't "check in" for their foraging shift at 9am and clock out at 5pm, rewarded for their days berries and leaves with a high-five from the leader and a handful of their food as payment while the leader enjoyed a feast and the forager enjoyed a meager existence.
They foraged as they were able, when someone was hungry.
They hunted when the game were around, or when meat was needed, as they were able.
Both foraging and hunting trips started when they were needed, and were blended with life and living. They took breaks, ate lunch, rested in the sun, socialized, and just spent time in relative leisure... While also being on a hunting trip. There were no firm margins that guarded work separate from life, and life separate from work.
Interestingly, they also worked less. Dramatically less.
You could fit an entire week's worth of contributions to their community, from domestic chores to gathering food and more, well within a 40 hour work week with time to spare.
In reality, people in these hunter gatherer societies dedicate the majority of their time to leisure. Spending time with family and friends, playing games, talking, telling stories.
Yeah, they don't have iPhones, but they have a heck of a lot more free time than we do. Everything in their lives is about their present needs. Hungry? Go find food. Tired? Take a nap. Feeling social? Talk to a friend. Dirty house? Clean it up. Body sore? Go for a walk.
And the agricultural revolution f*cked it all up.
As soon as someone figured out that they could reliably make food grow in specific places, in the quantities that they desired, if they put a little planning in place, everything changed.
First, land was needed to grow the food. Whoever controlled the land controlled the food and controlled whoever grew the food, so they held the most power. This is how the concentration of wealth began.
Second, growing this food required planning. You couldn't very well plant corn today to eat it today, could you? No, you had to plant it in the spring to harvest in the fall and preserve it for the winter, otherwise you'd starve.
This detached work from our immediate needs.
It was no longer, "what do I need right now" but "let's work as hard as we can in the spring to plant crops, as hard as we can in the summer to tend to the crops and livestock, and as hard as we can in the fall to harvest, so we can survive another winter."
Work was not as separate from life, as most people still lived outside of cities on individual farms doing the work of feeding everyone. They'd wake in the morning with the sun, put effort into future rewards all day, and come inside with the sunset to relax once they couldn't work any longer. They'd take breaks, to be sure, but now they were more out of necessity than desire. You can only work so hard before your body breaks down.
As the power continued to concentrate in those who controlled the land, and cities began to form filled with those who held the power, people started using slaves and serfs and peasants to do their work on the farm and produce food without having to put in effort.
And these serfs still worked less than we do.
Sure, they also didn't have iPhones. But they only worked about half the year. Any more than that, and they'd revolt, so land owners and politicians were forced to continue this to keep them happy.
This also led to the emergence of artisans and craftspeople. Shoe makers and candle makers and bakers and butchers and clothing makers all sprung up as specialized professions, often handed down in families, with multiple families of these specialized professions organizing together into social groups who supported one another. They worked much like the farmers, as much as possible without breaking their body, but also blended family and leisure with their work.
This, unfortunately, also concentrated disease, which wiped out many hunter gatherer societies and just left the agrarians to move forward in much of the world.
So in a relatively short span of human history, we've gone from an extremely ADHD-friendly environment focused entirely on needs in the present moment, needing hyperfocus and pattern spotting and distractability and for all community members to have multiple skills to function well in a society, one that centered leisure and comfort and connection with others...
... to a society that centered increasing production at all costs, emphasized present sacrifice for future reward, forced consistent work regardless of ability, and specialized skillsets in rigid social structures.
Almost overnight, in evolutionary terms, we went from being wired to succeed - to being wired to struggle.
And it's not just neurodivergent people who struggle with this. Neurotypical people didn't benefit much from this structure, either. Sure, they had easier access to food - but it was less nutritionally dense and began causing health problems, in addition to all of the diseases mentioned before spreading through cities. And existence, more and more, became about working today for success tomorrow and the gathering and hoarding of resources to concentrate power.
For people like us, however, we went from fitting perfectly into the world, to feeling like something is wrong with us because we can't function that way.
And then the industrial revolution separated it all.
We've already pulled from being present in our day to day lives and needs to being always focused on meeting future needs in spite of today's struggles.
The industrial revolution pulled people from fields and farms and artisan communities into factories and mines and industrial operations.
The more rigid and repetitive the work was, the easier it was for an employer to replace an employee, so industrialists worked very hard to make the work humans were doing as predictible, repetitive, and unskilled as possible.
Of course, this completely removed the joy and purpose from human labour, but what's that got to do with the production of capital? Am I right?
Since factories still produce in the winter, and have light after dark, the natural cycles of work were gone. 12 hour shifts, 6 days per week - that's what you got.
Again, in a blink, we moved further from our nature.
And work?
Work was now entirely separate from life.
Life had moved to the margins, to the 4 hours per day you weren't working or sleeping or at church. And that 4 hours had to include your domestic chores, too... So often, one family member had to stay home to do all of those. There simply wasn't time after work at the factory to do much.
Of course, since factories valued mens' strength over womens' dexterity and endurance, guess who stayed home?
You now have generations of neurodivergent women, adapted to forage and hunt for their communities and live in villages with support systems, forced to basically live alone taking care of the domestic lives of their entire families.
And that's if they were lucky enough to stay home.
Many women like us did both, the entire domestic load and working in factories and businesses outside of our homes. In spite of what history tells us, women often worked and worked hard outside of the home.
And that work, of course, was not suited to neurodivergent humans. Rote, repetitive, predictible and backbreaking, factory work was the polar opposite of a source of joy. It was in no way connected to immediate needs, or even to your needs. It was entirely separate from life, from joy, from connection and friendship and family and community contribution.
It was a grind, a hustle, pure survival.
It was in no way connected to immediate needs, or even to your needs. Factory work was a way of producing goods to create capital for the owner class in exchange for your small slice of it.
All in the hopes that there would be enough time left at the end of your week or the end of your life for some leisure.
It's like the fable of the fisherman, but as a whole society.
We all went from fishing in our village and lounging in the sun, to working for someone else for decades in the hopes that we can spend the end of our days fishing in our village and lounging in the sun.
Now, the knowledge economy enters the scene.
There are very real reasons for farms to follow the seasons.
There are very real reasons for factories to run as long and hard as the machines and workers can allow.
There is no good reason for the knowledge economy to follow the same rules, other than the fact that we've been following them for so long that they don't feel like man-made rules, they feel like facts about the way humans work.
But.
They're not.
And the research that people like Cal Newport and Ali Abdaal and dozens of others have been doing on productivity in the knowledge economy is showing us this. We don't actually work best in 40 hour work weeks, separating life and work.
We work best when we don't really "work" at all, as we see in the modern definition... But when we work the way our ancestors did.
Led by joy, interest, passion, and present needs.
And this isn't isolated. One study showed a 13% increase in productivity from employees who rated themselves as happy in the absence of all other factors. In sales, specifically, it wasn't an increased number of calls or leads, but an actual increase in conversions.
Happy people are more effective, not just more productive.
And this, my friends, is where we really circle around to the point.
Neurodivergent people are, in general, predisposed to seek out joy.
We are wired to do things that excite us and make us happy.
We are able to do more, longer, and better, when we're doing the things that we enjoy.
We are by our very nature committed to seeking out sources of joy and happiness, and acting on them until the effect wears off... And then move on.
This is, unfortunately, something that we learn to mask often. As I mentioned in a recent social media post, neurodivergent people are often taught that their joy is a warning sign - a sign that they're about to do something bad and therefore should pump the brakes and redirect.
Society isn't set up for people to be led by joy.
It's seen as wrong, as childish, as irresponsible. And yet according to all of the modern research on productivity, in theory, this should make us some of the most productive and effective workers in the knowledge economy.
And it can.
If... and only if... we stop following the rules of the industrial economy, and actually go back to the ways our ancestors "worked".
If we go back to...
- Blending work and life together, rather than forcing it to stick to a rigid schedule - allowing our work to be play and joy and our play to be work
- Following our passions and happiness, allowing it to dictate what we're going to do next (which, by the way, doesn't mean we'll never do difficult things)
- Bringing relationships and connections and rest back into our "work", bringing in our families and making friends and doing things together in community
- Resting when we need rest
- Creating when we want to create
- Allowing ourselves to rush off in a flurry of inspiration to do the thing, and then come back and relax into what we were doing before
- Considering our domestic chores to be a part of our "work" time, not our leisure time, and capping it accordingly
- Following the seasons and allowing needs and ways of meeting those needs to fluctuate as the seasons change
- Bringing more variety and novelty in our lives, the way nomadic peoples did and do, to keep our minds engaged
If we can work this way - following our joy and our needs - then I believe it may be possible for people like us to truly thrive in the knowledge economy.
We just have to hunt and gather joy.
