"The End of Xah Lee" and ADHD

I'd never heard of him, so I skimmed over his resume and checked out his site an hour or two before the call. I remember when I was looking at his site I was seeing various articles around math and programming, and then articles about things like "2 girls 1 cup". The breadth of articles completely threw me off. He seemed to have this unfocused interest in EVERYTHING. After looking over everything I could I had no idea how we'd be able to use him, but I was really interested in talking with him.

I went into the call expecting a lot of tangents about various topics he was passionate about and thinking I'd constantly have to refocus the conversation. Instead the conversation was pretty boring and not really going anywhere. He had breadth, but the depth was not there. At least not for the things I brought up. I couldn't understand how someone who seemed to be interested in everything could have no real interest in anything.

-- quoted from Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7756106

I suspect Xah (he's fine at least after the "The End" blog post, as far as I know) has terrible ADHD - in fact I remembered he talked about his mental illness when we were still kind-of friends back in 2015 (I cut ties with him after he claimed that the 2019 Hong Kong uprising was backed by the US - like bro, of course they would seek out to the US, they were going against HK gov which was backed by the CCP). This feels exactly like an ADHD person would do. ADHD's focusing ability is like an annoyingly huge and blunt sword, when you're using it towards a target you end up crushing the target (hyperfocus), pushing the target away (hyperfocus but focused on the wrong or superficial things) or completely missing the target (hypofocus), you can't slice things with it like a normal sword; and in the same spirit I suspect that I have ADHD too.

Would, one day, there be The End of me too?... If you could never control the power you possess, is it really a blessing like other people would think, or it's just another curse?

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