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Back in 2015, a team of Danish researchers followed nearly 2 million people and reported in the British medical journal The Lancet that an ADHD diagnosis roughly doubled the risk of dying early. The statistic has been quoted so many times it’s become conventional wisdom, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who’d thrown it at me. Not to mention worried parents of Hunter kids.

Finally, though, a group of researchers at Cambridge and University College London finally decided to figure out why that awful number was so consistently predictable. And it blows up this folklore that our Hunter genes are shortening our lives.

The team — led by Haibin Li and the epidemiologist G. David Batty — used the American National Health Interview Survey of just over 52,000 US adults and tracked them for nearly eight years. The preprint on medRxiv was summarized this month by the ADHD Evidence Project.

They found that people diagnosed with ADHD had a 58 percent higher risk of death during the study period, making an ADHD diagnosis as apparently dangerous as poverty, hypertension, or diabetes. Again, this was repeated broadly by a credulous press.

But then they started peeling back the layers. When they controlled for income, it shaved 11 percent off the early-death/ADHD link. Physical illnesses having nothing to do with ADHD took away another 15 percent. Smoking, drinking, inactivity, and obesity accounted for another 17 percent.

But the kicker was psychological distress. When they filtered out the ADHD people who did not experience anxiety or depression, fully 58 percent of that connection between early death and ADHD vanished altogether.

The result was so dramatic that they noted that the remaining risk was no longer statistically significant. As they wrote, the effect of ADHD on mortality was:

“largely embodied via a series of malleable characteristics, particularly mental illness.”

In other words it’s not having a Hunter brain that’s shortening people’s lives; its what happens when Hunters are repeatedly beaten down by a society with Farmer standards and expectations, producing anxiety and depression.

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On November 1st most of America will “fall behind” and set our clocks back an hour. For a few days millions of people will feel slightly unmoored, showing up too early or too late, being hungry at the wrong time, and wondering where the day went at its end.

For “normal” Farmer-type people that disorientation will last about a week; for us Hunters, though, it’s a pretty good description of every week of our lives.

Hyperfocus — when we’re excited and “on the hunt” — can wipe out an entire afternoon, while “waiting mode” for an appointment can feel painful. In several of my books on ADHD I’ve written about this phenomenon: Hunters live in an “eternal now” and so struggle with planning and organizing time.

While “normal” people have past, present, and future, we have “Now” and “Not Now.” My old nemesis Russell Barkley, who’s spent a good part of his career trashing my Hunter/Farmer framework, got this one right. He’s said that ADHD is, at its heart, a nearsightedness to the future, and he coined the phrase “time blindness” to describe it.

The research backs him up. A meta-analysis of 55 studies found that people with ADHD consistently make more errors estimating, producing, and reproducing intervals of time than people without it. The authors described what we Hunters all know; when we’re bored, time runs slow but when we’re on the hunt it flies by.

Where Barkley and I part ways is on the word “blindness.” Blindness is a defect. What I see in the research is an evolutionary leftover from the time before the agricultural revolution.

Consider what time actually means to an aboriginal Hunter, a person living the

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Sari Solden, a pioneering voice in understanding women with ADHD, joined me, for a deeply personal conversation about our early years in the ADHD movement, my hunter-farmer perspective, and the lifelong challenges of feeling different in a world that doesn’t always understand us.

We explore the hidden emotional costs of ADHD and the freedom that comes from letting go of shame and embracing our strengths.

Because the greatest breakthrough may not be changing who we are, but finally recognizing our own worth.

I hope you’ll listen and share your thoughts and experiences both with us and anybody in your life who needs to hear about it.

You can subscribe to Sari’s newsletter, The Inner World of Adult ADHD, here:

Sari Solden: The Inner Work of Adult ADHD

At Sari Solden: The Inner Work, I will share reflections, concepts, and personal stories focused on acceptance of ADHD, identity, loss, aging, and living well with a neurodivergent brain through weekly text, video, audio posts, and intimate live chats.

By sari solden

Warmly,

Thom

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Last month, Princess Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer, published a memoir called Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. It’s accusations against King Charles have gotten all the publicity, but I was fascinated by the parts where he talks about both him and Diana having ADHD.

He tells the story of how, later in life, he was diagnosed with “severe ADHD” and that when he thinks back on his late sister it’s obvious to him that she shared the same type of neurochemistry, even though she was never tested.

He notes that through most of her life people around Diana explained her intensity and her wounded withdrawals from friends and family using words like “paranoid” or “borderline.” In fact, he says, she was suffering from the pain of being misunderstood by Farmers in a Farmer’s culture; using his words instead of mine, he wrote that “rejection for people with ADHD goes very, very deep.”

When I read that, I immediately remembered being in England the first week of September 1997.

Sari Solden and I were both there to speak at one of the first conferences on ADHD ever held in Britain. Sari had recently published Women with Attention Deficit Disorder, the book that pretty much launched the entire field of women and ADHD, and I was there to talk about my theory of Hunters and Farmers.

Diana had died in Paris just days earlier. We’d come to teach people about a condition most Brits had never heard of, and we found ourselves in the middle of a nation in shocked mourning. The funeral was that same week, and we saw it all, the flowers and the crowds and the stunned quiet of a country that couldn’t quite believe that their beautiful, compassionate princess was gone.

Sari wrote about that week on her Substack a few days ago. She remembers standing up in front of a room full of British women, many of whom had spent their entire lives feeling like they didn’t fit and never knowing why, and — decades before Charles Spencer shared his thoughts about the way his sister’s brain worked — telling them that she believed Diana had many of the characteristics of a woman with undiagnosed ADHD.

Sari was both prescient and a trained and smart observer: she was almost thirty years ahead of Diana’s own brother. She also pointed out something I’d never put together in all the years since: “Diana” is the name of the Roman Goddess of the Hunt.

Her brother knew that well; in his eulogy that week at Westminster Abbey he noted that the woman named after the Goddess of the Hunt had ironically become “the most hunted person” of the modern age.

But Diana wasn’t only hunted by the press and photographers; she was also a Hunter, and she’d married into the most thoroughly Farmer institution on Earth.

That’s what a monarchy actually is. It’s a thousand years (literally!) of doing the same things in the same way, over and over again. Stand where you’re supposed to stand, wear what protocol requires, say words written for you by professional speechwriters, smile in way you’ve rehearsed, and be perfectly respectable.

And then do it again tomorrow and next week and next month and next year for the rest of your life. I can only imagine the pain Diana must have experienced; I sure couldn’t have done it.

In the British royal family, novelty is a threat and spontaneity is a “breach of protocol.” For that family’s long lineage of Farmers (with a few notable exceptions through the centuries) it’s just The Way Things Should Be. For a Hunter like Diana, though, it’s like living in a cage.

But, amazingly, look at what she did inside that cage.

Diana largely dumped the script: in 1987, when the world was still terrified of AIDS patients and the disease was considered incurable, when Ronald Reagan was still refusing to fund AIDS research or even mention the word, she visited AIDS patients in the hospital, took the hand of a man dying of the disease — without gloves — in front of the cameras.

A decade later she walked through an active minefield in Angola to highlight the danger of land mines she crusaded against. Her brother told Marie Claire that she had an ability to cut through the “conventional way of looking at a cause” and see the part that really mattered, and of her ADHD he said, “I think it enhanced the natural empathy in her.”

That’s the Hunter’s gift, and, for Diana, it came with the Hunter’s price. Put a person wired like that into a family that prizes emotional restraint above nearly everything, and you’ve set up a disaster. I’m guessing the same could be said of Prince Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson.

Also interesting is what Charles Spenser says the diagnosis did for him. He told Marie Claire that finding out late in life helped him understand things better, and that being able to pause in the middle of an overwhelming feeling and think, “this is how I’m wired, maybe that’s why I’m feeling this,” made all the difference.

That’s why I first started writing about Hunters and Farmers back in the 1990s. I wanted to give these kids (and adults) permission to be themselves, to see without artifice or BS what their weakness were but also what their strengths are and how they can be used.

I wish somebody had given one of my or Sari’s books to Diana; it may have changed or even saved her life.

Sari ended her post by asking her readers how they’re going to protect their own light this month. It’s a good question for every Hunter reading this, and it’s one she and I are going to dig into together.

This Saturday, October 17th, at noon Eastern, Sari and I are sitting down on Zoom for the first time in years to talk about those early days, about women and ADHD, about where we agree and where we don’t, and about what we’ve each learned in the three decades since that week in England.

It’s free for subscribers to either of our Substacks, and we’ll release the recording right afterward. If you’ve got a question for us, email it to sari@sarisolden.com with “questions for Thom and Sari” in the subject line. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Sari’s newsletter and to this one, and pass this along to a Hunter you love who still thinks she’s broken.

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Last week a psychiatrist writing in The New York Times asked a question the entire industry should have been bringing up for the past 50 years: What if ADHD isn’t really about “attention” at all?

He noted that when brain scientists talk about “attention,” they’re discussing the ability to pick out a relevant signal from all the noise all around us all the time, but that people diagnosed with ADHD mostly do just fine with that.

What Hunters struggle with is what he called “sustained engagement” — keeping focused on something for a long period of time. And, as every Hunter knows, that depends entirely on how interesting the object of that focus is: people with ADHD also have the ability to hyperfocus when something really tickles their attention. Think Thomas Edison trying 10,000 different filaments until he hit one that worked.

And, as the author of that Times article noted, sustained attention requires our brains deciding that it’s worth the effort, which is something entirely different from the ability to have attention at all.

He notes that we used to think that malaria was caused by “bad air” which is what “mal aria” translates to from the Latin/Italian of that day. We kept the word because we became used to it, even when we discovered it was a parasite, and nobody today is treated for malaria by giving them a trip to the countryside, like centuries ago.

Maybe we’re on the verge of the same thing with ADHD. In 1968, the DSM called it a “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood.” Then Canadian psychologist Virginia Douglas ran ADHD kids through a series of tedious lab tasks and argued, in her famous paper “Stop, Look and Listen,” that what was really going on was that the hyperactivity was the consequence of “sustaining attention and controlling impulses.”

In other words, kids were bad at doing boring tasks, so they must have some sort of “deficit” because “normal people” can deal with boredom. The DSM renamed the entire thing Attention Deficit Disorder in 1980, and seven years later they added “hyperactivity” back into the name.

But nowhere in the process did anybody ask how these studies would have turned out if the tasks kids had been given were actually things that mattered to them.

I ran up against this personally when my son was diagnosed with ADHD and told that his brain was disordered. I saw what kind of hurt those words caused him, and also knew that his brain was just fine; it was pretty much just like mine, after all.

So I published my first book on ADHD in 1993 to tell a different story and it’s now — in updated edition — a classic in the field.

In it I described the Hunter as tireless and capable of sustained drives, but only when “hot on the trail” of some goal. That’s what’s called “sustained engagement.”

A Hunter tracking an animal across miles of country doesn’t have an attention problem. But a Hunter sitting through a boring and probably unnecessary meeting about next quarter’s deliverables struggles, just as this author noted in the Times. One of those tasks registers as worth doing and the other one doesn’t.

The essay cites two pieces of research that fit this picture better than the author may realize.

The first is a 1992 experiment by the British psychologist Edmund Sonuga-Barke, who though to give “hyperactive” children a choice between a small reward right now and a bigger one later.

Everybody in the field had always assumed that the kids would grab the small reward in the “now” because they couldn’t handle delayed gratification, but, to his surprise, they only chose the immediate reward when doing so let them get them out of the room sooner. They could wait with no problem, in other words; they just couldn’t stand meaningless waiting.

Anybody who’s ever hunted or fished will recognize that distinction. A Hunter can sit still in the brush or a blind in the forest for hours, because that kind of waiting is full of meaningful information. Every sound and shift in the wind could tell you something about the animal you’re stalking. That’s very much not the case with our schools and workplaces, however.

The second notion he mentioned is my old nemesis Russell Barkley’s idea of “time blindness.” Barkley (often dismissively) describes people with ADHD as living in a narrowed present, an eternal now, where future consequences don’t carry much weight.

But a hunt happens entirely in the present: the animal is either there or it isn’t, and if you can catch it you’ll eat tonight and if you don’t you’ll go hungry..

Farming, on the other hand, is nearly the exact opposite experience. You plant the crops in April and harvest them in October, a process that requires a mind that’s capable of extending the urgency of now into a distant future.

School, mortgages, retirement accounts, and performance reviews almost all exist in Farmer time; when people can’t handle that, we diagnose them as broken.

This problem with the wrong name and the use of terms like “attention” “deficit” and “disorder” also do another, quieter kind of damage. The Times essay points out that people struggle with chronic lateness, boredom, a short fuse, or an inability to start anything without a deadline bearing down on them are often not diagnosed because none of those problems immediately invoke “attention.”

The author is clear that ADHD can cause real impairment and that treatment works; he cites observational research linking medication to lower rates of death, accidents, and substance abuse. I agree, and I’ve never told anyone to throw away a prescription for “Farmer pills” if they’re helping them.

Hunters engage when there’s novelty, when the stakes are real, when feedback is immediate, and when the body is moving. So break big projects into pieces that you can finish today. Invent deadlines and set reminders. And if you’re a parent, try having your kid do their homework in 15-minute slices with play or TV in between.

If this is the conversation you want to be part of, subscribe to Hunter in a Farmer’s World and pass this along to somebody who’s still carrying the wrong label around.

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Sari Solden is not only a dear old friend, she’s also one of the world’s most brilliant and outspoken advocates for women and adults with ADHD. She’s authored and co-authored numerous books and articles, and now has a really great Substack newsletter, Sari Solden: The Inner Work of Adult ADHD.

And in a few weeks, she and I are going to do a Substack live event together. It’ll be on October 17th, at noon ET/9 AM PT, and you’ll get a notice or link to it if you sign up to get her newsletter or you’re a subscriber here.

So, be there or be square! See you in a few weeks!

— Thom

Here’s the announcement as Sari sent it out from her site: Note from Sari:

Thom and I both want to thank all our Substack subscribers for their support, and we offer this interview as a thank you and in celebration of ADHD Awareness Month.

I personally want to thank Thom for his continued support all these years and for joining me in this conversation.

(What follows is an announcement of the event)

************************************************************************************************************

Thom Hartmann and Sari Solden are excited to announce a reunion between two of adult ADHD”s early pioneers to celebrate ADHD Awareness month.

Thom and Sari met and worked together over thirty years ago when Adult ADHD first burst upon the scenes. They both had iconic ADHD books that are popular to this day. Thom’s, ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World,” and Sari’s, “Women with ADHD.”

On October 17th, they will get together once again for a conversation about their early days in the field of adult ADHD and their provocative roles as disrupters of the previous status quo. They will discuss how their work, among others, catapulted ADHD into the national conversation and what that experience was like for each of them personally.

In this personal and intimate discussion, they will also discuss their individual views of ADHD, areas of agreement as well as any differing perspectives, women with ADHD, neurodiversity, and the various books they have written on the subject over the decades.

*************************************************************************************************************

We invite all of our Substack subscribers (regardless of paid status) to be personally involved with this conversation by submitting questions in advance for Thom and Sari.

Please send questions in advance to sari@sarisolden.com.

This will make it easier to gather and organize.

Please put a header on them such as “questions for Thom and Sari.” Sari will choose several and following their conversation they will have time to answer many of these questions.

Our plan:

We will record live on zoom on October 17th at noon for an hour program and release it immediately afterwards to all our subscribers.

We hope you enjoy this conversation.

With gratitude,

Sari

*****************************************************************************************************

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling author having written over 34 books in print in 17 languages. He is the nation’s #1 progressive radio host. His books are on politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world. Thom’s work has transformed the lives of literally millions of people, and altered how psychiatry, psychology, and schools treat ADHD. You can find him on Substack at : The Hartmann Report and ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World.

Learn all about Thom and his work at thomhartmann.com

Sari Solden, M.S, psychotherapist, has counseled thousands of adults with ADHD for 38 years, and is considered a pioneer who launched the movement of adult women with ADHD. Her award-winning book, Women with ADHD, launched the field over thirty years ago. Her subsequent books, Journeys Through ADDulthood, and more recent book, A Radical Guide for Women, co-written with Dr. Michelle Frank, is currently a leading book on adult women with ADHD (revised addition to be released in the spring of 2027). She is a prominent keynote speaker, and is a consultant to women mental health professionals who have ADHD themselves. She is the host of the Substack community and newsletter:

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There’s a fascinating new study out of Denmark — which can easily do these kinds of analyses because they have a national healthcare system that leaves nobody out — on kids and teens who were diagnosed with ADHD or autism between 2012 and 2022, a ten-year period, comparing them to those kids who avoided either diagnosis. They looked overall at 2.1 million Danish kids, with roughly 71,000 having gotten a diagnosis.

For decades, kids with an ADHD or autism diagnosis were more likely to have been preemies, have low-income and/or low-education parents, a parent with a psychiatric history, and were frequent visitors to the doctor (often for accidents).

What’s fascinating is that the Danish team found that this “classic” profile is disintegrating. At the start of the decade, a child born at low birth weight was 54 percent more likely to end up with an ADHD or autism diagnosis than a child born at normal weight. But by the end of the decade, that gap had shrunk to 17 percent. The same collapse showed up for premature birth and for nearly every measure of family disadvantage they checked. The first author, Magnus Elias Tarp, put it plainly:

“What we found is that people diagnosed in recent years resemble the general population more closely than those who received the same diagnoses a decade ago.”

And this isn’t just a weird one-off. In June, a companion study from the same Danish research network, also in JAMA Psychiatry, examined the polygenic risk scores of more than 20,000 people diagnosed with ADHD between 1994 and 2016. The more recently someone was diagnosed, the lower their genetic loading for ADHD, and for autism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia as well.

The authors concluded that their data “support broadening diagnostic criteria as an explanation for increasing rates.”

I read both of these and thought about the kids I knew decades ago.

In the late 1970s, Louise and I were running a residential treatment and educational program for abused children. Instead of ADHD, the word was “hyperkinesis,” and the children who carried that label were generally the same ones that old risk profile would have predicted.

Many of these children had been born prematurely or at low birthweight to mothers who’d had no access to affordable prenatal care. The vast majority came from families where poverty, mental illness, and violence had been passed down for generations. They arrived with files an inch thick, and every single one of the kids we saw in the 5 years we ran that program were labeled as “suffering from hyperactivity” or the “hyperkinetic syndrome.”

I spent a week with Dr. Ben Feingold in his San Francisco apartment learning about his diet, ran a study with our kids, and published the results in 1981. It was my first published work on what we now call ADHD, and every child in it fit the profile the Danish researchers say is now somehow magically going away.

I didn’t get all this until almost a decade later — when my son and I were both diagnosed with ADHD — helping me realize that the wounds those abused kids carried weren’t the things that made them into hyperactive Hunters, or what “caused” their “hyperkinetic” diagnoses.

Instead, because they’d been both the victims of poverty and abuse (and the way they were treated in school because of their ADHD), their “Hunter-ness” was far more visible. A Hunter kid born into a broken home who can’t sit still in a classroom gets a file and sometimes a criminal record or beaten up by a short-tempered parent. A Hunter kid born into a stable, wealthy home gets called “spirited,” has a tutor and private college-prep class, and after doing his or her homework is simply sent outside to play.

For roughly three decades I’ve been arguing that what we call ADHD is a set of traits that were essential in hunting and gathering societies but became a liability when the Agricultural Revolution moved most of us humans into the Farmer’s world of fields, factories, and classrooms.

In this way of looking at ADHD, it becomes part of a distribution rather than some random disease that hits some kids and misses others. It’s like height or weight; there’s a bell-curve that it falls on the ends of, and that’s what these two Danish studies are pointing out.

When you think of ADHD kids as damaged or incompetent, that throws them into the far edges of that bell-curve, but was the threshold for diagnosing ADHD moves closer to the middle of that bell-curve you’ll suddenly start noticing the “ordinary Hunters,” the ones who’ve never been seriously injured by birth or life circumstances.

The result is that ADHD starts to look less like an illness and more like a normal part of the curve distribution of humanity overall.

The American numbers are increasingly telling the same story. Parent-reported ADHD diagnoses in this country rose to 10.5 percent of children by 2023, but the increase came almost entirely among kids who were rated as having “mild” or “moderate” ADHD. Most came from families with the means to carry private health insurance that covered mental issues.

The “severe” cases weren’t going up in number here in the US any more than in Denmark; in fact, the opposite was happening. More and more Hunter kids are being diagnosed yet also falling closer and closer to the “normal” middle of that curve’s distribution.

In other words, the entire notion of what is or isn’t ADHD and who does or doesn’t have it started, years ago, with the wrong assumption. It asserted that the classroom and cubicle are just fine for all of us, and the variable that made Hunters pop out was that they were broken or defective.

But what if it’s the classroom or the cubicle that’s the problem, not the Hunter? That’s the essence of my argument, and over and over again I’ve seen (and documented, and seen in my own life and family) cases where when you change the environment for the ADHD child or adult, suddenly the ADHD is no longer a problem.

The label describes your wiring, in other words, but not your worth. Hunters do fine when they can make use of their scanning and free thinking and energy; they crash and burn when they’re told to sit down and shut up for hours at a time.

That’s the conversation I want to be having as ADHD Awareness Month begins this week. Not about how many of us there are, but let’s discuss what kind of a world we’re going to build for the Hunters among us who we’ve finally learned to see.

If this resonates with you, forward it to the parent who just got the diagnosis and is wondering what they did wrong and let them know that they didn’t do anything wrong, they just gave birth to a noble Hunter.

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It was almost thirty years ago when my son was diagnosed with ADHD (and I was later) that I went on a search for explanations and came up with my “Hunter in a Farmer’s World” hypothesis. I argued that what we’re calling a disorder was actually a collection of traits specifically designed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help us survive in the hunting/gathering environment in which humanity evolved.

These traits only became problematic, I argued, when most of humanity (there are still aboriginal hunter/gatherers) settled down and started farming, a way of producing food that requires a very different skill set from those of hunter/gatherers.

Just four months ago, some new research was published that not only backs up my hypothesis but even takes it a step further. A study published in BMC Psychology comparing a group of people diagnosed with ADHD to a similar group (521 adults) who definitely don’t have ADHD found that there’s another characteristic we need to add to the diagnostic criteria for ADHD: curiosity.

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After measuring their subjects’ levels of ADHD traits and characteristics, they tried something no researchers had before: testing people for their levels of curiosity, which they defined as the urge to seek novelty, embrace uncertainty, and crave “new” experiences.

To their amazement, they found that the higher people scored on classic ADHD characteristics like hyperactivity, impulsivity, and risk-taking the higher they also scored on curiosity.

The correlation was almost shockingly high: people with the highest levels of ADHD traits were more than four times more likely than the normies in the study to show higher-than-normal levels of curiosity.

Was it ADHD-driven curiosity that led Columbus and Leif Erickson to North America? Or Native Americans across the Pacific? Or created some of our most amazing inventions? Increasingly, this research suggests that’s exactly what was going on.

Call it “the urge to explore.”

Looking at it this way, the kid who’s distracted in class by the bug crawling across the ceiling is just as curious about the bug as Columbus was about the New World.

This fits perfectly with my Hunter/Farmer hypothesis (in fact, in my first book on the subject, I profiled one of history’s great explorers, Sir Richard Burton [not the actor]).

This willingness to abandon a boring task for a more interesting one may also have been an evolutionary advantage for the gatherers among our hunter/gatherer ancestors.

Two years ago, researchers tested this hypothesis based on the observation that indigenous hunter/gatherer tribes today usually abandoned berry patches or other areas rich in food before they’d exhausted them, allowing them to regenerate in ways that guaranteed the plants’ survival into the following year.

To find out if this was associated with ADHD, they had people with and without ADHD play an online foraging game gathering berries from a virtual patch on a computer screen, and watched who abandoned a patch and moved onto the next one and how quickly they arrived at that decision.

People scoring highest on ADHD characteristics abandoned the somewhat depleted patches faster than their Farmer peers, who basically wiped them out.

They concluded that the ADHD people “favored exploration over exploitation,” thus enhancing survival probabilities over the long term, a finding that nestles neatly into this most recent discovery of curiosity as a primary characteristic of ADHD.

Back in 2024, one of the authors of this new King’s College study (Anne-Laure Le Cunff) proposed what she called “an evolutionary mismatch theory of hypercuriosity.”

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Echoing my work from the 1990s (although she was probably unaware of it), she argued that this urge to investigate new things, chase novelty, and explore unfamiliar territory were actually survival skills in an “ancestral environment” where resources could be thin, dangers were everywhere, and information was scarce.

In today’s modern environment, though, we’re torn. Our phones and screens are constantly demanding our attention and Hunters are unusually vulnerable to things like screen addiction according to some researchers. On the other hand, our workplaces and schools demand Farmer-like attention spans that can crush a curious Hunter.

The solution, of course, is what I’ve been proposing ever since my first book on the subject, ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World, was first published in 1996. Find work that challenges you, that carries high levels of novelty, and that’s constantly new.

In fields like sales, detective work, journalism, and the early stages of entrepreneurialism there are always these things in abundance. (One of the best lessons I’ve learned starting 7 business over the past 50 years is that once the business is stable, bring in a Farmer to run it.)

So, all of this new research suggests that instead of fighting our own curiosity, we just need to learn how to aim it.

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Every year around this back-to-school time, mainstream media feels obligated to run articles about ADHD; this past week it was The New York Times’ turn.

In a gentle, well-meaning explainer titled How A.D.H.D. Changes as You Age that starts out with a Southern California family where both the kids and the parents have been diagnosed with ADHD, it lays out the standard story with a small tweak from a recent study: little kids are hyperactive, but as they progress in school they become “inattentive” and, eventually, either “grow out of it” or, as adults, have a bit of both hyperactivity and inattentiveness.

I’ve been in the middle of this “What is ADHD?” maelstrom for the better part of 45 years, from running the Hunter School for ADHD kids in the 1980s to having published a bunch of books and lecturing all over the world on my Hunter/Farmer hypothesis. So, when I read this article in the Times, the sentence that jumped out at me about a third of the way into it was:

“As children age and start to have more responsibilities and expectations at school, inattentive symptoms become more prevalent, and ultimately more persistent.”

While the article doesn’t mention my work or the controversy, it basically says the same thing I’ve been saying for decades but apparently without realizing it: the kid didn’t change; he just got handed a bigger pile of Farmer’s work. Every year of school involves more rules, more sitting, more worksheets and tests, and more postponed gratification. All of which he’s trying to avoid because it hurts.

Michelle Martel, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky, was the paper’s expert for this article, and she noted that, basically, children struggle more with inattention in a structured school environment where they’re expected to do things they’d rather not, and the “symptoms” of ADHD “improve” in adulthood (or even college) when a person can find a job that suits their Hunter temperament.

After Dr. James Swanson at UC Irvine added that trouble at home can make things worse, a few paragraphs later the article points out that this reflects “mounting evidence that people’s environments can influence their symptoms.”

Yeah, like I’ve been saying since I published my monograph on the hyperkinetic syndrome in the 1981 Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. (That was before I’d developed the Hunter in a Farmer’s World concept, and had spent time with Ben Feingold so we were testing his diet out, but even then I noted that our rural setting, lack of television, use of horseback therapy, and a structured environment all seemed to ameliorate symptoms.)

The study the Times cites was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry that was a 2021 analysis from the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD, the big NIMH project that followed several hundred kids diagnosed in the late 1990s from early childhood into their mid-twenties.

They found that only about 9 percent of ADHD kids ever reached what the researchers referred to as a “sustained recovery” from the condition, while about 10 percent were full-blown ADHD no matter what. And the great majority — about two-thirds of the kids — fluctuated in and out of diagnosability (sometimes multiple times over the 16 years of the study) with a swing of six or seven symptoms between their least-ADHD and worst-ADHD stretches.

If ADHD was a fixed “brain defect,” you’d expect to find a fixed picture of symptoms over both time and changing circumstances. But the most amazing part of that study published in Clinical Psychiatry wasn’t mentioned by the Times: that for most of these young people their symptoms receded or were “in remission” when they were living/working in situations that had what they called “higher environmental demands.”

Not lower, higher. Living on their own, holding a job, paying their bills, raising kids: these things seem to have made their ADHD symptoms vanish:

“During remission periods, individuals with ADHD successfully manage increased demands and responsibilities.”

In other words, as life gets harder, as people face more varied and interesting challenges from rent check to a baby, the symptoms often go quiet. But, as you could easily predict, put that person back into a fluorescent-lit and boring classroom and those symptoms would come roaring back.

This has been my lived experience. For 23 years now, I’ve walked into a studio every weekday and done three hours of live radio, five days a week, and never once had trouble concentrating on it because every microphone, every camera-change, every caller, every breaking story is a new “rustle in the brush” that alerts and gratifies my Hunter instincts.

When I get home and have to deal with a massive stack of emails and the details of the radio/TV business, however, my mind starts to wander. Same brain, same day; the only thing that changes was whether the job at hand was a hunt or a harvest. Hunter work or Farmer work.

When Louise and I ran that residential treatment program and school back in the 1980s, kids who were called “unmanageable” in the referring classrooms could spend all day building a shelter in the woods without once being told to calm down or sit still. Same brain, different environment.

The Times article also correctly noted that hyperactivity in adults tends to “go underground.” The CDC says much the same thing.

That’s not the Hunter’s brain changing: it’s the result of either finding appropriate work (a good outcome) or decades of harassment for being who they are that’s taught them to hide their “symptoms” (a less-than-good outcome). The Farmers then write it up as “maturation” and congratulate the patient on having “outgrown” their ADHD.

There’s a broader body of work that underpins much of this. In a 2016 study based on that same MTA cohort, researchers found that the young adults who were tracked all those years repeatedly reported that when they found themselves with fast-paced, demanding, stimulating jobs they were most successful, and struggled the most with the slow, repetitive work. A meta-analysis the same year found the same thing; the symptoms changed based on the environment, not because the child or adult had aged or was suddenly “fixed.”

Hunters can thrive, in other words, in a hunting-like environment, but ask them to become Farmers and they’ll crash and burn whether they’re five years old or fifty.

A psychiatrist who’s spent years running an ADHD evaluation practice and is a regular in the comments section here, Ron Sterling made a version of this same point in a reader comment to the Times that they chose not to publish. Using lactose intolerance (something I also have, so can easily understand) as his metaphor, he points out that you don’t have symptoms until somebody hands you a glass of milk and you down it. Then, suddenly, you have “symptoms”!

He prefers “planner-adventurer” to Hunter/Farmer and focuses on working memory rather than my evolutionary story, but we’re both ending up largely in the same place: the symptoms only show up in a challenging environment that doesn’t match the abilities of the person being studied.

And, to be fair, this Times article is a real improvement over what the establishment was saying eighteen months ago.

When Paul Tough’s magazine piece pointed out that ADHD symptoms wax and wane with changes in a person’s circumstances, Psychiatric Times ran a rebuttal scolding him, reminding everyone that diabetes doesn’t go away on summer vacation. Now the Times’ own health desk is telling us all that ADHD symptoms track classroom, work, and life demands, and is quoting tenured professors saying so.

Where the Times article fails is not pointing out that if the symptoms change based on the child’s setting, perhaps what we’re all measuring isn’t dysfunction or disease, but a simple mismatch between neurochemistry/brain-wiring and environment.

The clear next step is for us to help Hunters, particularly Hunter kids, to find the things in their world and work that feel like the hunt, things with urgency, novelty, movement, and a personally meaningful outcome. Look for those situations and circumstances (and even teachers and subjects) where the symptoms “go away” and focus on and learn from those.

Instead of teaching Hunters to be good Farmers, we should be helping them find their own hunting grounds where they can both succeed and, as adults, prosper.

If this piece was useful, send it to a parent or a teacher who needs it. And if you’re new here, subscribe.

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While most of us Hunters are (painfully) aware of our limitations (and our skills), the most pernicious of all the stories we sometimes tell ourselves about our ADHD is that it means we can’t really count on ourselves when the going gets tough. It’s one of the most common concerns that pop up in therapists’ offices, and the least often publicly discussed.

Last month, an article by J. Russell Ramnsy, a recently retired psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, caught my eye. He calls this “self-mistrust.”

Ordinary mistrust, he notes, points outward; we don’t trust others because they’ve lied to us, abandoned us, or somehow otherwise given us a reason not to trust them. But with self-mistrust, the person we’ve stopped believing is ourselves.

The mechanism Ramsay is talking about was first written about in detail in Albert Bandura’s seminal book Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control: it’s a small idea with enormous consequences.

Most of us think that self-confidence is a question of our capability to do something. But Bandura separated out a second and much sneakier question, which is whether you can get yourself to stick with the thing once all the boring, irritating, unrewarding parts of it show up.

Ramsay’s argument is that the challenge of being a Hunter is never the “knowledge problem” that so many in the “ADHD is a crippling disability” crowd promote. Rather, he says, it’s a “performance problem.”

We can do a job, and know deep down that we can do it, but we tell ourselves the story — reinforced by people like Russel Barkley who insist that Hunters are damaged goods — that we’ll inevitably fail or give up because of our ADHD.

We’ve stopped believing in ourselves, in other words.

Instead, he notes, we should be looking to our successes, and understand the mechanisms in our life that help promote them, ADHD or not.

For example, for the past 23 years I’ve hosted a daily radio program that’s live three hours a day five days a week. In all those years, I’ve never once procrastinated about going on the air.

Meanwhile, I have a stack of papers on my desk at home that go back to the Carter administration and every time I try to dig into them I get distracted and am off to something else within minutes.

Same brain. Same guy. Same day, sometimes. What changed wasn’t my willpower or my character: it was whether the external conditions of the radio show were doing the starting for me.

That’s the Hunter’s ignition system: our nervous systems were built to be summoned by the world rather than commanded from within.

In a hunting and foraging world, we didn’t just one day sit down and decide to be alert. Instead, something moved in the brush and we’re alert, instantly and completely, without any act of will required.

Novelty, urgency, and interest fire us up: the engine was always ready, and the ancient hunting-gathering environment was always full of ignition sources, and so nobody in that world ever needed to develop the peculiar skill of talking themselves into jumping into a task that really didn’t much matter to them.

Then agriculture came, and later the classroom and the office, and every ignition source got removed by the Farmers. We found ourselves in quiet rooms with predictable tasks, no urgency or novelty, and deferred rewards (typically a paycheck).

Farmers can deal with that without a problem. It’s the whole Farmer skill set, the ability to keep going through the long unglamorous middle of a task because the harvest is four months out and somebody has get out there and weed those rows that will one day be dinner.

So we Hunters tend to fail that Farmer’s test, from kindergarten to college and into the world of work. And not just once, which anybody could shrug off, but over and over again, thousands of times throughout our lives. And throughout it all, the Farmers are telling us:

“Careless. Lazy. Not applying himself. Doesn’t try. Can’t focus.”

Eventually, we’ve heard that story so many times that we start telling it to ourselves. That’s where self-mistrust comes from. It isn’t a symptom of ADHD: it’s scar tissue on the wound this Farmer’s world has inflicted on us.

I saw it constantly in the years Louise and I helped run a residential treatment program for children in New England. Those kids came to us already fluent in their own internal self-indictment. They could recite it, and would if you just asked them. At twelve years old most had a fully developed theory of their own worthlessness; overcoming that was consistently our biggest challenge.

And we can’t just talk ourselves out of this; self-trust is the result of our having developed a track record that we can trust. And that’s often the result of our reorganizing our lives so we live in a world filled with novelty and fascination, and our time-related issues have external cues like that red light that goes on in my studio every day at noon ET.

For me that has meant setting deadlines that are tangible and finding work that I actually care about. It has also meant partnering with Louise — who’s a Farmer in a Hunter’s family — and who’s spent decades running each of the five businesses we’ve built (including the radio show) while I did the sales and performance parts of the work that matched my neurochemistry.

If this article hit close to home, please send it to someone else who needs to read it. And if you’re new around here, subscribe and I’ll keep bringing you what the research actually says, week after week, from the Hunter’s side of the fence.

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Two weeks ago, Britain’s Channel 4 ran an hourlong show titled The Great ADHD Myth? that featured National Health Service psychiatrist Max Pemberton, an ADHD skeptic. The show drew 9,656 complaints from the public — people taking the time to find and pull up the channel’s online feedback form and let go with a blast — a massive negative reaction that’s well beyond normal for documentaries.

At the end of the show, Pemberton laid out his hypothesis: ADHD isn’t a disorder of the brain but is, instead, a mere “social construct.” Something we’ve all as a society decided is real, but was just arbitrarily put together by someone for some reason and has now stuck with us.

One ADHD skeptic, Dr. Iona Heath, told him flatly that it’s definitely not a medical condition. Another child psychiatrist predicted that a century from now people will be looking back on today and marveling at how “gullible” we all were.

As “proof” of the hypothesis, the show followed a 10-year-old boy who used diet and lifestyle changes to replace his medication. But then the folks in the ADHD community in the UK got together to dig into the program and discovered that the child had actually gone back on his meds and the result was a measurable improvement in his schoolwork.

Even though their experiment didn’t work, they ran with it as if it had. It provoked one of the contributing researchers, Professor Katya Rubia, to publicly pull her support from the film, as Channel 4 tried to defend itself by saying that there’s “considerable debate” about ADHD. That’s an understatement.

But here’s what’s really bizarre about the entire episode: everybody in the show was looking at ADHD in a binary sense — it’s either a brain disease/disability or it’s a social construct that we’ve all invented — and in my humble opinion they’re both wrong.

Back in the 1970s, Louise and I started and ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused children. Some had files thicker than your forearm and none of those kids were “a social construct.” Virtually every kid we ever worked with had what we’d call ADHD today; in many cases it was their parents trying to punish them out of their Hunter behavior that led to the abuse in the first place.

Most struggled in school, but take them into the woods and they were suddenly alive and entirely aware of everything around them (our program was on 140 wooded acres on a small lake).

This show and most of the mainstream “debate” about ADHD falls into those two categories: illness or social construct. But what if it’s neither but, instead, an adaptive set of skills and behaviors that kept our ancestors alive for 300,000 years before the advent of intensive agriculture?

The traits we call ADHD are, of course, entirely real. And they’re also clearly heritable.

The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement, put together by 80 professionals from 27 countries, examined 208 conclusions drawn from meta-analysis and very large studies and heritability was the main thing that kept popping up. Particularly in twin studies, the gold standard for that type of research.

They concluded that heritability of ADHD ran around 74 percent, which puts it among the most easily inherited conditions in all of psychiatry and medicine, even higher than type 2 diabetes. Social constructs don’t produce those sorts of correlations; genetics do.

But heritability doesn’t mean “brokenness.” Pemberton, et al, acknowledged the heritability of ADHD, but concluded it was like inheriting a disabling condition. It’s certainly a challenge for some, but for others (including myself) it’s also a source of inspiration and can drive great success.

Those genes are still doing their magic after all these generations and despite the best efforts of Farmers among us to stamp them out or crush their presentation. They kept us going for 300,000 years of hunting and gathering: the person who was constantly scanning their environment was the one who caught that movement in the brush that was the tribe’s lunch. They drove him to track that animal across 15 miles of forest or savanna.

Those are Hunter traits, not deficits. They’re an ancient job description, necessary for the survival of our species in that era.

Then, about ten thousand years ago, we invented agriculture and, as Dan Quinn documents in his brilliant novel Ishmael, everything changed. Out of Farmer’s patience, repetition, and sustained attention to single, unchanging tasks and tolerance for delayed rewards we built schools, offices, and factories.

And we made them all on the Farmer’s templates, which is why we’ve been calling the Hunters defective ever since.

So when Pemberton wrapped up his show by saying we should change Hunter kids’ diets, cut access to screens, and adjust their lifestyles he was moving in a reasonable direction: environment is critical for success for Hunter children (and adults). But it’s not TikTok or sugar: it’s the classroom, the cubicle, and the 8-hour stretch of sitting still doing repetitive, boring work.

ADHD UK surveyed people who’d watched that broadcast and found that one-in-five experienced “severe distress” and 38 percent said the show caused them “significant distress.” The Royal College of Psychiatrists warned that invalidating ADHD would discourage people from seeking help and encourage Farmers (my word, not theirs) to further vilify and discriminate against Hunters.

ADHD UK’s chief executive, Henry Shelford, was blunt, saying that we wouldn’t have The Menopause Myth or The Dyslexia Myth, so why this?

Us Hunters are neither a myth nor are we broken. We’re the descendants of the Hunters who kept humanity alive for millennia, and many of us are damn sick and tired of being asked to choose between the argument that we’re broken or our diet or social media are making us crazy.

If this made sense for you, please pass it along to someone who watched that broadcast and felt something crack. And if you’re new here, subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next. Every week I go looking for what the research actually says, and, thankfully, every week it keeps pointing the same direction.

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One of the main myths about people with ADHD is that we just can’t sustain effort.

“She won’t stick with anything.”
“He starts strong and then begins to drift off.”

It would kind of run face-first into a group of people who routinely spend as many as thirty consecutive hours doing one single thing, in the heat, all alone with nobody watching and no prize waiting at the end.

But there they are. Looking at 601 long-distance runners (marathoners and ultra-marathoners, average age 43) in France, Switzerland, and Spain, researchers ran them through the ASRS-5, the standard five-question screen for adult ADHD. Fully a tenth of them scored as Hunters, a rate around three times what you’d find in the general population.

It was the first time I can find where anybody bothered to look for ADHD among this population, and there it was! So, what’s this all about? After all, if ADHD is a “deficit of sustained effort,” the results should have come out that the trait was barely perceptible among ultra-marathoners.

The confusion comes from Farmers making conclusions about what “attention” is and how it works for Hunters. They argue that it means sitting at a desk for hours doing boring schoolwork or turning a bolt on a screw over and over again for 8 hours a day in a factory.

What Hunters know is that the way attention works for us is that we lock onto a target and, if it’s interesting, we’ll refuse to let it go for as long as it takes.

That’s not some kind of wild-assed metaphor that I invented for a book. It’s how our ancestors actually survived.

Long before we humans had invented the bow or even the spear thrower, we hunted by outlasting our prey. Pick an animal and run it down, with the human advantage of hairless skin and long legs that don’t overheat as fast as furry animals do when chased.

Two decades ago, scientists Bramble and Lieberman laid out the anatomical case for this, posting that endurance running is a “derived capability of the genus Homo” that dates back at least two million years. That experience shaped both our bodies and our minds.

Consider what that would involved: Hours of continuous tracking of the prey; constant scanning for a print, broken branch, or a footprint in the dust; the ability to single-mindedly hold that one goal even as the landscape scrolls by. It would require huge tolerance for discomfort, uncertainty, and the very real possibility that you’d end up coming home empty-handed.

Much of this is right in the middle of that ADHD diagnosis. But for the ADHD runners, their marathons were simply that hunt — and the persistence it demanded — without the animal or the meal at the end.

That same research team — using that same runner cohort — also delved into their experiences of anxiety and their ability to easily sleep (poor sleep is often informally associated with ADHD; I don’t think I’ve slept an entire night in my life).

What they found was that about a quarter of them regularly experienced anxiety, another thing frequently associated with ADHD (although there’s a debate about why; could it just be from growing up misunderstood as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world?).

I can’t begin to recall how many Hunters have told me anecdotally that exercise, particularly running or mountain-climbing, was their best ADHD therapy. That it calmed them down for days, helped them concentrate, and made them feel more whole and less anxious. People who can’t sit through a 40-minute meeting at work are running 10 kilometer races and loving it.

Louise and I walk at least a mile together every day, and climb a mountain every weekend (and we’re in our 70s); it’s our best time to talk things through, brainstorm new ideas for business or writing or our kids, and keeps us deeply bonded. I’ve never been good at sitting still, and thankfully my Farmer wife is okay with this exercise that I need to keep my brain working.

If you’re the Hunter with race medals and an otherwise scattered life, or you love one, forward this along and subscribe here so we can keep making the case together.

Ten thousand years ago our ancestors would have called the result of that race “dinner.”

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Louise used to coach entrepreneurs and couples with ADHD issues, and this was always one of her strongest pieces of advice: “Do what you’re good at, and hire out or delegate the rest.”

She learned that from being married to me all these years and raising three Hunter kids. When we started the radio show 23 years ago, for example, I had piles of papers all over the studio (that was in our living room in Montpelier, Vermont at the time).

Each pile was meaningful to me, as I have — as she’s pointed out over the years — a piling rather than a filing system because, like a typical Hunter, if I can’t see something it ceases to exist.

So Louise picked picked up an old postal sorting piece of furniture from a second-hand store. It was about four feet high by six feet wide and had about fifty little boxes facing out where they used to stick mail. She put labels on half the boxes and sorted my piles into them, and instantly I could grab an article or bit of research on the fly when I needed it to rant about it on the air.

I’m terrible at being organized, at least in the conventional sense (my favorite picture, which hangs on the wall of our studio, is a photo of Einstein’s desk when he died) and Louise is really good at it, so she just took over that part of our work together. I’m pretty good at being a talk-show host, though, so I did that.

Similarly, a friend of ours started a small business just down the road from us and one day over dinner was complaining about how much he hated doing all the bookkeeping and taxes that are a necessary part of running your own business. She strongly recommended that he hire a bookkeeper or a payroll service and he did both.

Six months later he was expanding his business, because now that the stuff he hated was under control he could refocus his energy on things he was good at like visiting potential customers to sell his services. It’s now so successful and running on its own as he’s learned to delegate responsibility that he’s regularly taking trips around the world to pursue his diving hobby.

And now science is catching up with her advice. The largest study ever published on the strengths people with ADHD have dropped last October, titled “The role of psychological strengths in positive life outcomes in adults with ADHD.”

They found that most people with ADHD identify the same strengths they have, including creativity, hyperfocus, intuition, broad interests, “being up for anything,” spontaneity, and humor, and that those people who worked with their strengths and outsourced their weaknesses did far better in life than Hunters who instead tried to do everything. Their exact conclusion was:

“We conclude that … interventions that focus on enhancing people’s strength knowledge and promoting the everyday use of their personal strengths could have universal applications to improve wellbeing in adulthood.”

They also found that those Hunters who played to their own strengths also excelled in the key requirement for success in life: Perseverance.

When Louise and I were first married, I was very into the self-help movement at the time, and had a poster on the wall of our bedroom that we carried with us from apartment to home to home for decades. It purported to be a quote from President Calvin Cooledge, although its origin is broadly disputed. Nonetheless, it changed the course of our lives.

The other amazing detail the researchers found was that the self-reported “severity” of ADHD symptoms bore no relationship to eventual adult success in relationships and the world. Instead, the single variable was a person’s persistent embrace of their strengths.

That study also lines up with one published just five months ago in the Journal of Attention Disorders that looked at 125 separate studies on adult ADHD strengths, an examination that literally did not exist in the 1990s when I started singing this Hunter-in-a-Farmer’s-World song. Here’s what they concluded:

“It was observed that typical ADHD characteristics were sometimes perceived or redefined as strengths: interest-based attention or positive differences in attentional ability (n = 52; 42%), energy or positive differences in activity levels (n = 33; 26%), and adaptive risk-taking or positive aspects of impulsivity (n = 19; 15%). Other strengths identified across studies included: creativity (n = 82; 66%), prosocial attributes (n = 39; 31%), entrepreneurship (n = 14; 11%), resilience (n = 16; 13%), flexibility (n = 14; 11%), uniqueness (n = 16; 13%), and other characteristics (n = 24; 19%).”

This isn’t just good advice for Hunters, by the way. Harvard’s Ashley Whillans and colleagues surveyed over 6,000 adults across four countries and found that those people who shifted the workload from themselves to others so they could do what they loved or were good at had substantially higher life satisfaction. Purchases that “bought time” away from drudgery (like hiring a maid or bookkeeper, etc.) and thus freed up time for interesting things were more highly valued than purchases of goods.

Those who didn’t hire help for the stuff they hated reported that they forced themselves to do those jobs — even while sacrificing quality of life — generally did so because they believed doing so proved they were “lazy.” They either judged themselves or feared being judged by their peers or family.

“Lazy,” of course, is the label that’s been hung around the neck of every Hunter kid who ever encountered a public school. I was labeled lazy in second grade (in part because I could already read the lessons bored me silly), before I finally got enrolled in Dwight Eisenhower’s gifted kids program (in reaction to Sputnik going up in 1957).

When we grow up with that word echoing in the back of our memory all the time, hiring or asking a spouse for help, or telling an employer what you can do well and what they should farm out to others (pun intended) seems to prove it. It feels more like a confession than a strategy.

But another systematic review of 79 studies covering more than 68,000 workers with ADHD diagnoses found that ADHD can be a real asset in the workplace when the workplace accommodates itself to a Hunter’s brain wiring. Their conclusion:

“ADHD confers multiple challenges and strengths related to employment but this relationship is largely dependent upon person-environment fit and appropriate workplace accommodations. Neurodiversity is not necessarily a hindrance if individuals with ADHD are permitted to adapt their working conditions and work in a supportive environment. We recommend that employers, supervisors, and coworkers embrace the strengths conferred by ADHD and adopt inclusive hiring and managing practices.”

Not everybody, of course, can hire a bookkeeper or housekeeper, but delegation and hiring help aren’t the only options available to us Hunters. In the case of Louise and me as partners in the roughly 7 business we’ve started and run over the past 50+ years, we simply divided up the work according to what each can do best. We do that with household responsibilities, too.

This is sometimes called “Job Crafting,” quietly reshaping your job so more of the week is spent on those things you do well rather than the things you hate and thus do poorly. Advances in AI are also helping a lot of Hunters adapt; Sari Solden wrote brilliantly about this just a few weeks ago.

So consider taking a little time to evaluate the parts of your work or life that are fulfilling, where persistence is driven by enthusiasm, and compare them to those that are drugdge work, and see how you can change things around. I can testify from my own experience that it can make a big and genuine difference.

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“Executive function” is the big buzzword these days in ADHD circles. Psychology Today defines it:

“Executive function describes a set of cognitive processes and mental skills that help an individual plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals. The ‘executive functions,’ as they’re known, include attentional control, working memory, inhibition, and problem-solving, many of which are thought to originate in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.”

The hit on Hunters that’s been going on since the 90s when people like Russell Barkley starting claiming that the main feature of ADHD was a lack of quality executive function has been that this is the fundamental “weakness” we experience.

Out of that has grown a mini-industry of people selling everything from books and lectures to computer games and therapist-led trainings to improve executive function. It’s a billion-dollar industry nowadays.

So, of course, a group of scientists decided to see if there’s anything to this idea that it’s possible to train Farmer-quality executive function into a Hunter’s brain. What they found simply confirms what I’ve been saying for three-plus decades and Popeye said so eloquently: “I am what I am” and that’s not going to change.

A meta-analysis published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology examined 52 randomized controlled trials covering nearly three thousand children, testing four different types of executive function training.

They included: Computerized working memory drills with coaching; face-to-face stop-signal and rule-switching tasks; cognitive flexibility software; and a hybrid program that paired exercise with mental demands.

While they found that “three of the four produced statistically significant improvements” the statistical significance of those “improvements” were shockingly minor. They were essentially nothing.

Scientists have a mathematical threshold for what they’ll say counts as a “small effect” and it’s a standardized mean difference of 0.2. But the single largest effect in the entire analysis of all of these studies came in at 0.097, less than half of that floor.

The authors described the results as “modest,” but that’s a wild overstatement when you look at their actual findings.

On the other hand, a separate meta-analysis of school-age children who were diagnosed ADHD found medium effect sizes for inhibitory control and working memory from what they called exercise interventions.

But it wasn’t just the physical exertion that produced the benefit; regular gym-style exercise produce no measurable improvement in executive function. What did improve it, though, was the type of exercise that requires both physical activity and interaction with a team, where logic and strategy are part of the game.

Like soccer, football, baseball, and other team sports. They all produced measurable improvements — far greater than the billion-dollar executive function industry’s products — in the ability to think, reason, and remember.

Which makes perfect sense for Hunters. After all, in hunter-gatherer societies, hunting is a team activity. It’s exercise combined with continuous pattern recognition, rapid revision of strategy when faced with uncertainty or problems, and a clear reward when the team actually brings home dinner.

The Hunter’s brain, in other words, didn’t evolve to hold still and pump iron or even to run in circles on a track: it evolved to move and read the world and immediately adjust to changing circumstances.

This explains why when we build an ADHD intervention that accidentally recreates those conditions, kids improve. On the other hand, when we ask the kid to be a good Farmer for thirty minutes, the science shows little to no result.

We keep getting this backwards because we keep starting from the wrong question, that assumption that Hunters have “broken brains.”

The whole architecture of this new industry of executive function training rests on a dysfunctional premise: that a Hunter’s brain is a Farmer’s brain with certain parts underdeveloped, and that with sufficient repetition and hard work we can grow or repair the missing, damaged, or underdeveloped parts.

Just fix the child with some computer games or boring mental exercises, this industry argues, and suddenly he’ll fit into the classroom.

Researchers in Sydney this year found that this so-called ADHD “impairment” is mostly the mismatch between a Hunter’s brain and the setting in which it must work, rather than any kind of dysfunction or failure inside the brain itself.

Change the setting, they found, and much of the disorder goes away and now the Hunter is operating at peak function.

I learned this the hard way, long before the phrase Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder was ever invented.

I got thrown out of high school in the tenth grade for starting a little newspaper railing against the war in Vietnam and the school administration’s support of it via the draft. My dad, a Republican supporter of the war, printed it on his office’s mimeo machine, and defended me when they threw me out; he helped me transition that year straight into community college.

It wasn’t that I lacked executive function; it was that I was both bored and horrified by my school’s support of an illegal and immoral war and had the working memory, task initiation, and follow-through (aka “executive function”) to produce the newspaper.

Years later I watched my son go through his own version of my experience in school. The ADHD diagnosis nearly crushed him because the doc we visited tried to tell him that his brain was broken and he needed a drug to correct his “neurotransmitter deficiency.”

It turned out, as we discovered when we moved him to a different (Waldorf) school, that what he really needed was intellectual challenges and an educational environment that met his needs rather than forcing him into a boring Farmer regime.

So if a school is pushing executive function training on your child, ask them if they still have recess and organized sports activities. Having your kid chase a ball across a field, reading the other players, revising the plan every four seconds, is a heck of a lot more powerful and therapeutic than his clicking through a computerized “set-shifting exercise” that fifty-two studies just proved will do almost nothing for him.

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Back when I first came up with my Hunter/Farmer hypothesis and wrote my first books about it in the 1990s, there were only a few drugs available to help out Hunters stuck in Farmer schools or workplaces. It was basically Ritalin and Dexedrine.

Thirty-plus years later the selection is wider, and last Friday it got bigger again.

The FDA approved a drug called centanafadine, which Otsuka will sell under the name Simtriyo, for adults and for kids six and older who weigh at least twenty kilos. What’s fascinating about this new drug is that it’s not a stimulant like most of the other ADHD pharmaceuticals.

The stimulants we’re familiar with — going back to Dr. Bradley’s Miracle Math Pills (Benzedrine) in the 1930s — work by jacking up levels of the brain chemicals norepinephrine and dopamine. Simtriyo picks up those two and adds in serotonin, all three at once, which makes it the first “triple reuptake inhibitor” ever cleared for ADHD.

As you know, I’ve never argued against medication for ADHD, although my critics love to wave my Hunter/Farmer theory around and claim I have. I’ve seen stimulants give people back their careers, their marriages, and in more than a few cases even the overall quality of their lives.

When my son was handed his diagnosis as a boy, the label nearly flattened him. What gave him back his life wasn’t a pill; it was him, Louise, and me figuring out what his brain was actually built to do.

That said, medication was a tool for him for a while, and tools — a hallmark of humanity — are good things to have. In this case, this new drug, I find the serotonin aspect of it the most fascinating.

Growing up as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world can cause psychic wounds and psychological trauma that can lead to everything from irritability to rejection sensitivity to full-on PTSD.

Because many of our most effective (and most controversial) antidepressants (the SSRI or “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors”) work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain, some clinicians theorize that this new drug may help with that aspect of Hunter-ness along with the other two neurotransmitters that the stimulant drugs effect.

That said, the adult trials suggest this may not quite be a blockbuster when compared to the older drugs for people who actually need pharmaceuticals to function in this Farmer’s world.

In two pivotal studies, the numbers ran from about 0.24 to 0.40 against placebo, which, in plain English, tells us the real effect iss noticeably smaller than what similar studies report for stimulants.

The single most comprehensive evaluation of ADHD treatments ever assembled, an umbrella review pulling from more than two hundred meta-analyses, still puts stimulants at the top of the list for both kids and adults.

The Simtriyo trials ran just six weeks and their findings of improved executive function came from a post hoc analysis, a backward-looking review. The full results haven’t even been presented at a scientific meeting yet, so, for the moment, this should be thought of as a promising new option, not a pharmacological revolution.

And then there’s a word buried in the label that should get a lot more attention than it has in the literature, particularly that written for patients and potential patients.

Half the coverage on Friday described Simtriyo as a nonstimulant, but its manufacturer’s (Otsuka) own prescribing information calls it a “central nervous system stimulant.” It also carries a warning, like most stimulants, about the potential for abuse and misuse. And it won’t actually be available until the DEA schedules it, which is expected later this year.

So, the headlines say one thing but the label says the opposite; this deserves some explanation, but I’m not finding it in articles written for the general public. And because it’s labeled as an abuse-potential-stimulant, odds are it’ll end up having some of the same supply and reluctant-to-prescribe problems as the other stimulants do.

It’s also important to remember that no medication can make you into a Farmer. What it can do, when it works, is quiet the external noise enough that you can point your attention where you decided to point it instead of where the last interesting thing (Squirrel!!!) dragged it.

It’ll be a while before we start getting reports back from people using this new drug, particularly long-term results, so keep track of this.

If you’re a Hunter considering a new option, Simtriyo may end up being a good one, especially for those who’ve had a rough time with traditional stimulants or who’re carrying anxiety alongside everything else.

But the pharmacology was never the part we should have been debating. For decades, we were, instead, getting the story wrong, the one where they tried to tell us that a Hunter’s brain is simply a Farmer’s brain with the wiring damaged.

If this helped you think about it differently, forward it to the Hunter in your life who’s already texted you about Friday’s news, and subscribe here so we can keep reading the fine print together.

The label always tells us more than the headlines do.

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Back in the early days of my business career, I discovered that I do my best work in bursts, at odd hours, in (often messy) places I’ve arranged to suit my own brain.

I wrote big chunks of my first book on ADHD at two in the morning, surrounded by what my wife Louise lovingly calls my “piling system.” I loved the quiet and lack of distractions, and by putting things in piles instead of folders I always knew where things were.

I frankly can’t even imagine spending my working life in a fluorescent room with a supervisor walking the aisles and a phone ringing four desks over.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because 2026 has become, according to the media, the year of the great march back to the office. After five years of letting people work from home, companies are now starting to issue five-day-a-week here-instead-of-home mandates.

One workplace consultancy noted this spring that these kinds of office mandates have triggered a surge in accommodation requests that most employers weren’t ready for, and a big share of those requests are coming from neurodivergent workers who’d spent the pandemic figuring out how to thrive at home…and are now being told to show up in the office.

This entire drama is the Hunter and Farmer conflict playing out in real time, although almost nobody is calling it that.

But the open-plan office wasn’t designed for Hunters. It was designed for Farmers, and it was designed by Farmers, the very same way nearly everything in our institutional world has been since agriculture took over about ten thousand years ago and then was replaced by machines and now computers.

A Farmer’s brain is built for sustained, repetitive, low-novelty attention in a fixed location: sit in one spot, do the predictable tasks, ignore any distractions, and then repeat tomorrow for years. That’s not an insult, by the way; it’s an extraordinary and necessary skill that fills the granaries and keeps the lights on.

The office, with its rows of desks and its nine-to-five rhythm and its culture of being seen at your station, could be thought of as, essentially, a climate-controlled wheat field. It rewards the people who can pick bugs off plants, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and find it rewarding.

But look what happens when you drop a Hunter into that field. The Hunter’s brain is a scanning instrument, built to track everything in the environment, to notice the rustle in the grass and the shadow at the edge of the clearing: for most of humanity’s hunter/gatherer history the person who noticed everything was the person who ate dinner and didn’t become some big animal’s dinner.

The brain of a Farmer is wired for a kind of sustained, unvarying attention at a fixed post: put in one spot, go through the predictable motions, put aside any distractions and do it all over again come tomorrow. No insult intended here; it’s an essential talent to keep the lights on and the granaries full.

In its way, the office with its nine-to-five cadence and rows of desks is like a climate-controlled wheat field. There’s a certain reward in being seen at your station or picking bugs off plants for hours on end.

In an open office there’s nothing of value for that radar to fix on, so it fixes on all it: the typing of a colleague, the coffee machine chatter, the door swinging open. By three o’clock the Hunter is exhausted from the effort of filtering, with less to show for it than he’d have after two hours of concentration at his kitchen table.

I’m not alone in this assessment; the workers themselves tell us as much. The Washington Post recently examined the response to these mandates and came across neurodivergent staff who said the home office was the first place they could put their own spin on their environment and energy.

They’d made their own hunting ground. One woman told the Post that she was merely trying to get by in a society not constructed for her. I have heard that, in one form or another, from virtually every Hunter I’ve spoken with in my nearly forty years of listening to them.

There’s a bitter irony here. Many of them were doing fine work from home. The company’s issue was never with the output but with the optics, with control and the old Farmer notion that if a supervisor isn’t looking over your shoulder it isn’t real work. And now we’re rescinding the very tools that allowed Hunters to work in their element because it puts the Farmers running things at ease.

Researchers, however, are cautioning against it; a British study has shown that such rigid return-to-office policies can be a hindrance to disabled or neurodivergent employees and serves only to entrench inequality in the workplace.

Researchers studying these policies are now warning businesses that these strict in-office rules tend to deepen workplace inequality rather than improve performance, and that they hit those people hardest whose brains don’t match the standard mold. One British analysis explicitly discovered that return-to-office mandates can actively disadvantage disabled and neurodivergent staff who’d used working from their homes to manage their distraction and exhaustion.

We finally handed Hunters a tool that let them work like Hunters, the ability to work from home in their own space, and now we’re taking it away because it makes the Farmers in charge uncomfortable.

There are some real positives to having everybody in the office. They include mentoring, the accidental hallway conversation, and the energy of a team solving problems or building things together. For many people, including many Hunters, some of that in-person time produces genuine benefits.

So, the error wasn’t bringing people together but, rather, the one-size-fits-all decree, based on the false assumption that there’s a single correct way for a human brain to be productive and that that way is the Farmer’s way, performed in the Farmer’s environment, on the Farmer’s schedule.

We’ve built an entire economy that increasingly runs on the very traits Hunters are good at. Novelty. Pattern-spotting. Rapid pivots. Comfort with risk and chaos.

About a fifth of adults today describe their own brains as wired differently, according to surveys. And that number is steadily climbing as more people read about things like ADHD and find the language to describe what they’ve always known about themselves but couldn’t put into words.

Corporate leaders, however, often force highly creative problem solvers back into traditional office rows, where their strengths are mistaken for symptoms.Instead, people with ADHD should be able to design their workspace.

Where possible, give them quiet, give them flexibility about hours, judge them on what they catch rather than on how many hours they sat still.

Years ago I told my son, who’d just been handed an ADHD label that nearly crushed him, that he had two choices in a world run by Farmers. He could learn to fake the Farmer behaviors when he absolutely had to, or he could find the corners of the world that actually wanted what his brain did naturally.

What I didn’t know then was that one day technology would carve out a third option, a way to do real work for real companies from a place a Hunter got to design. After the pandemic shock, we just spent five years proving it worked. Now would be a foolish moment to forget.

So if you’re a Hunter staring down a return-to-office mandate this year, know two things.

First, you’re not broken and your exhaustion doesn’t mean failure. Your brain is staying alert because the office offers little meaningful information to process. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Second, you have more both legal and moral standing to ask for what you need than you might think, and there’s a growing pile of evidence on your side.

If this gave you words for something you’ve been feeling, forward it to the Hunter in your life who’s dreading Monday, and subscribe here so we can keep making the case together. The Farmer’s field isn’t the only place worth working. It never was.

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When I ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused kids back in the late 1970s, long before I’d ever heard the phrase attention deficit disorder, we had one particular boy who could simply never stop moving. He tapped, rocked, and bounced his knee under the table until the silverware rattled, constantly in motion. And every adult in his life had spent years trying to make him hold still, and every one of them had failed, finally turning to the violence to control him that led him to our place.

One afternoon one of our childcare workers, completely out of patience and ideas, tried something novel, mostly just to get him out of her hair for a little bit. She sent him out to run laps around the house before dinner. He came back flushed, grinning, and — astonishing everybody — for about an hour afterward was the calmest, most focused kid in the house.

None of us could understand why. But we knew for sure that whatever we’d been doing wasn’t working, and that that running circles around the house, of all things, had worked.

I think about that little boy every time a new study comes out confirming what his body already knew (and I later discovered). And lately they’ve been coming out fast.

A sweeping review published late last year found that plain old physical activity produces real, measurable improvements in hyperactivity, impulsivity, and impulse control in people with ADHD. It’s measurable right down to the electrical activity you can read off their brains.

The Child Mind Institute, summarizing the research this spring, reported that as little as a half hour a day of moderate to vigorous exercise can help kids focus and feel better. Not only that, the effect shows up in both the bouncing-off-the-walls type of ADHD and the quiet, dreamy, inattentive type. Move the body, in other words, to settle the mind.

I believe our species has known this since before we even thought about attention deficit disorder. We’ve known both Hunters and Farmers.

A Farmer’s mind and body, for example, are built for a Farmer’s life. Long hours in a fixed posture, bent over the same patch of ground picking off bugs or planting seeds or weeding, the same repetitive motion from sunup to sundown. Stillness and repetitive “boring” work, for a Farmer, isn’t a punishment: it’s the natural shape of their life’s work.

When the Industrial Revolution happened, picking bugs off plants was replaced by putting bolts on screws on an assembly line, but the motion, the type of life, the mindset necessary were all essentially the same.

So, when we built modern schools and offices, we built them around that Farmer’s mind and body, around the assumption that a healthy, well-behaved human can sit in a chair for six or eight hours and that anyone who can’t is somehow suffering from a “deficit” associated with a “disorder.” We even invented a phrase to describe the failure to sit still, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and called restlessness a symptom.

But the Hunter’s mind and body were never built to sit; they were built to move across a landscape. To walk for miles tracking an animal, to freeze, to sprint, to climb, to crouch in the brush and then explode into action when the prey finally came into view.

Movement isn’t a distraction from the Hunter’s attention: movement is the trigger for a Hunter’s attention that activates his entire system. When you take a body that’s calibrated for motion and pin it to a chair, the engine doesn’t switch off. It idles. Which is why idling, in a Hunter, looks like a tapping foot, a clicking pen, or a kid like me in Second Grade who keeps tipping his chair back until the teacher snaps.

We’ve spent decades trying to medicate and discipline that fidgeting away, when the fidgeting was a Hunter’s brain’s own crude attempt to crank up the level of arousal it needs to reach peak function. The body was self-medicating in the only currency it had: motion.

Movement is the oldest, cleanest, most available form of that endogenous stimulation there is. It’s the rocket fuel we Hunters were issued at birth. The boy running laps wasn’t burning off bad energy; he was generating the very best kind, the alertness and motivation that let his brain finally lock in.

It also helps when the movement is outdoors (although it’s not absolutely necessary).

Study after study has found that exercise outdoors, in green spaces, does more for ADHD than the same exercise done inside. When WebMD rounded up the evidence on the best exercise for ADHD, it reported bluntly that being in nature while a person moves around can reduce hyperactivity symptoms far more than moving indoors.

The researcher Frances Kuo spent years documenting this and found that the greener the setting, the better children with ADHD could focus afterward, to the point where she started describing time outside as “a kind of natural treatment.”

Some of the earliest work on this, out of the University of Illinois, also found that a simple walk in a park left kids with ADHD measurably calmer and more able to concentrate than the same walk for the same distance and time down a city street.

A Farmer might find these results puzzling. Why would the trees matter? Movement is movement, after all. But a Hunter knows the answer in his bones. Of course the green space helps: the green space is home!

The Hunter’s brain was tuned over hundreds of thousands of years to operate in exactly that forest or jungle environment, reading the wind and the light and the edges of the tree line or the savanna, and there’s a deeply felt nervous-system relief that Hunters experience when they’re finally in the landscape they were designed for.

The fluorescent lights in the box of the schoolroom drains the Hunter; the forest restores him. We didn’t evolve in a cubicle, and some deep, ancient part of us has never stopped knowing it.

Of course, exercise isn’t a replacement for medication, and I’d never tell a struggling parent or adult to throw out a prescription if it’s helping. The same researchers who praise movement are clear that for many folks, children and adults, medication works best alongside other supports, not instead of them.

As we all intuit, a Hunter’s life in a Farmer’s world is rarely helped by just one intervention. But movement belongs near the very top of our toolkit, and it’s the one tool that costs nothing, has no side effects worth fearing (it even makes us more healthy!), and was issued to every one of us standard upon birth.

So it’s time to stop fighting the internal Hunter’s engine and start feeding it. If you’ve got a kid who can’t sit through her homework, send her around the block first as fast as possible and watch what happens over the next twenty minutes.

If you’re an adult Hunter who hits a wall every afternoon, the answer might not be another cup of coffee but, instead, a brisk walk, ideally somewhere with grass and sky in it. While the complicated, mind-and-body sports tend to help Hunters the most (the martial arts and the trail runs and the things that make you pay attention while you move), a plain walk in the park is serious medicine too.

The point isn’t to become an athlete but to give a Hunter’s body the thing it’s been asking for all along: movement.

As I described years ago in these pages, my son used to get that wounded look whenever the subject of school came up. What I wish I’d understood back then is that some of what we were treating as a focus problem was actually just as much a body problem.

The fix wasn’t to make him more like a Farmer. It was to let the Hunter run and Louise figured that out when she started encouraging him to skateboard and get active instead of trying to keep him at the table with his homework. Short bursts of homework punctuated by a run down the hill on the board worked like magic.

If this astonishing but intuitive research struck a chord, take it for a walk and think it over, then come back and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. And forward it to any parent you know who’s been told their kid “just needs to settle down.”

Maybe what that kid needs is to get outside and move like the Hunter he or she is.

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There’s a moment I’ve described before, sitting up in bed at two in the morning sometime around 1990, reading a deadly dull article about the genome of wheat to try to get me back to sleep, when the whole hunter-and-farmer idea came to me in a flash. My son had just been handed an ADHD diagnosis and a story that stole his hope, and I was hunting through everything I could find for a better story to give him.

What hit me that night was the realization that the behaviors we were calling symptoms, the scanning and the impulsivity and the appetite for stimulation, were a perfect description of what a Hunter would need to survive in a forest full of food and danger. I’ve spent more than thirty years since then watching the science slowly, sometimes grudgingly, catch up to that two a.m. thought.

The latest catch-up arrived in December, in the pages of one of the most prestigious journals in the field, and it’s amazing how close it comes to the truth while still managing to point in the wrong direction.

Researchers at Rockefeller University reported that they’d identified a gene, called Homer1, that shapes attention by controlling how noisy the brain is at rest. Mice with lower levels of two particular versions of that gene had quieter brain activity and, the researchers found, sharper focus.

The team was careful and the work was elegant. They mapped a stretch of DNA that, remarkably, explained close to a fifth of the variation in attention they were measuring, which is an enormous effect for a single gene. And they framed the whole thing around a single idea that’s the hinge on which this entire conversation turns.

Attention, they said, comes down to the brain’s ability to separate signal from noise. ADHD, in this telling, is what happens when too much background activity drowns out the things that matter.

And so the exciting possibility they raised is a new kind of medication, one that would calm the brain rather than stimulate it, dialing down the noise so the signal can come through. They even found the mechanism, an increase in the brain’s natural braking system that quieted the idle chatter and let the important cues land cleaner.

Now, I have nothing but respect for that research. It’s genuinely beautiful work, and if it eventually helps people who are suffering, I’ll be the first to cheer. But I want to gently turn the picture around, the way I turned the wheat article around all those years ago, because what the scientists are calling noise, a Hunter would call the whole point.

Picture the forest again. A hunter moving through it cannot afford a quiet brain. He needs the radar wide open, registering every rustle in the leaves, every shift in the light, every snapped twig, because any one of them might be dinner and any one of them might be a predator.

What looks like background noise in a laboratory looks like survival information in the wild. The brain that fires at the faintest stir, the brain that refuses to filter out the periphery, is not a broken brain. It’s a sentinel. It’s the brain that kept our ancestors alive long enough to become our ancestors.

The Hunter’s nervous system is tuned to a low threshold on purpose, set to catch the weak signal that the calmer brain would miss.

So here’s what the Homer1 study actually found, told as a Hunter would tell it.

They located a setting in the brain, a knob, that determines how sensitive your radar is. Turn it one way and you get the watchful, scanning, everything-matters Hunter. Turn it the other way and you get the calmer, narrower, one-thing-at-a-time Farmer.

And then, because the entire enterprise of modern psychiatry was built inside a Farmer’s world and measures success by Farmer’s standards, they looked at the two settings and decided the Farmer’s was the healthy one and the Hunter’s was the disorder to be medicated away!

The drug they’re dreaming of isn’t a cure for a defect. It’s a dial that makes a Hunter’s brain behave like a Farmer’s for a while. Which, you might remember, is exactly how I described Ritalin to my twelve-year-old son. Farmer pills, I called them, and I meant it without contempt. Sometimes you need to act like a Farmer to survive in a Farmer’s institution, and a tool that lets you do that on demand is a real gift.

The trouble is never the tool. The trouble is the story we wrap around the tool.

If you tell a child that scientists have found the gene that makes his brain too loud and that there’s something wrong with him that needs quieting, you’ve handed him the same hopeless story the psychologist handed Justin, just dressed up in newer molecular clothes.

But if you tell him that his brain is set to a sensitive, watchful, ancient setting that was the difference between life and death for a hundred thousand years, and that the modern classroom just happens to be a place with almost nothing worth detecting, you’ve told him something that’s every bit as scientifically true and a thousand times more useful.

Same gene. Same mechanism. Same study. Completely different floor to stand on.

And notice what the research itself quietly admits. The scientists pointed out that the same gene and its partners show up in studies of several different conditions, not just ADHD but autism and schizophrenia too. They found a fundamental dial of human attention, a piece of basic wiring that varies naturally across people.

That’s not the signature of a disease. That’s the signature of diversity, of a species that hedged its bets by producing brains tuned to different settings, some watchful and some steady, because a tribe with both kinds in it survives conditions that would wipe out a tribe with only one. We didn’t all get the same setting because we were never supposed to.

This is the part I’d want any parent reading a scary headline about the ADHD gene to hold onto. Finding the biological mechanism behind a trait tells you how it works, but it tells you nothing at all about whether it’s good or bad, any more than finding the gene for height tells you whether being tall is a blessing or a curse.

That judgment doesn’t come from the laboratory: it comes from the environment you measure the trait against, and from the story the culture decides to tell itself. For a hundred thousand years the environment was the forest, plain, savanna, or jungle and the story was that the watchful one led the hunt. We changed the environment in the blink of an evolutionary eye, and then we changed the story to match, and we’ve been calling our sentinels broken ever since.

I don’t expect the press releases to start describing Homer1 as the gene that gave us our finest Hunters. But you can describe it that way in your own house, to your own kid, because it happens to be the more complete truth. The science keeps confirming the mechanism. What it can’t do, and what’s left to us, is decide what the mechanism means.

If this gave you a sturdier story to stand on, pass it along to someone who needed it, and subscribe to keep these in your inbox. The researchers found the knob. Let’s just be careful about who gets to decide which way is up.

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Louise has a line about me she’s been using for over forty years. She says I don’t have a filing system, I have a piling system.

It’s true, and it’s not going to change. My office has always looked like a paper avalanche froze in mid-collapse, because the part of my brain that should sort and label and put things in their proper folders is the part I got shortchanged on. My one consolation is the picture above, which hangs on my wall.

I can chase an idea across three decades and a dozen books. But ask me to maintain an orderly calendar or remember to file the thing or break a big project into tidy sequential steps, and you’ve found the exact place where my Hunter brain runs out of road. For most of my life, the only fix was to marry a Farmer (did that), hire a Farmer (did that, too), or simply suffer (did a lot of that!).

So you can imagine how I feel watching what’s happening right now, as ADHD adults all over the world discover that they can, for the first time in history, put a Farmer on staff for almost nothing.

I’m talking about the way people with ADHD have started using AI. Not for the diagnosis stuff I wrote about a few weeks back, but as a daily working tool, a kind of tireless assistant that handles the very jobs a Hunter’s brain handles worst.

The neurodivergent corners of the internet have been buzzing about this for a while now, and the more thoughtful write-ups have started calling it what it really is.

One foundation that works with ADHD students and adults described AI not as a productivity gimmick but as external executive-function support, a system that helps stabilize thinking, cut down overwhelm, and actually get a person moving.

That phrase, executive function, is the clinical name for exactly the cluster of skills Hunters tend to struggle with. Planning. Prioritizing. Sequencing. Remembering. Starting the boring task and then, God help us, finishing it.

Think about what that means through the lens we use here. The Hunter is brilliant at the things a hunt requires: scanning, improvising, spotting the pattern nobody else saw, locking into ferocious hyperfocus when the chase is on. What the Hunter is bad at is the Farmer’s work, the patient, orderly, one-step-after-another labor of maintaining a system over time.

And the cruelty of the modern world is that it buries the hunt under mountains of Farmer’s work. To do the exciting thing you love, you first have to schedule it, budget for it, email six people about it, and break it into a project plan.

For a Hunter, that pile of administrative underbrush is often the thing that kills the dream before it starts. Not because the Hunter lacks the talent. Because the Hunter lacks the patience for the paperwork standing between him and the talent.

What AI does, when a Hunter uses it well, is clear the underbrush. The members of one ADHD peer-support community reported using these tools to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, the single move that paralyzes more Hunters than almost anything else.

Adults have described handing the machine a tangle of obligations and getting back a clean schedule, or dumping a chaotic pile of thoughts and getting back a draft they could actually edit.

Writers with ADHD talk about using it to get over the first hurdle, to brainstorm, research, or produce a rough first version so they’re correcting instead of facing the terror of a blank page. The tools that seem to help most, according to people who’ve tested a stack of them this year, are the ones that hold onto context across days so the Hunter doesn’t have to keep everything balanced in a working memory that was never built to hold it.

I’ll be honest, the first time I really understood this I felt something close to grief, the good kind. I thought about my son at twelve, drowning in a school system that judged him on his weakest skills. I thought about the boy at the treatment center who couldn’t sit still. I thought about my own piling system and the assistants and family members who’ve spent years being my external memory out of love.

And it struck me that a kid getting an ADHD diagnosis today is walking into a world where, for the price of next to nothing, he can hand the Farmer’s work to a machine that never sighs, never judges, never makes him feel like a failure for needing to ask the same question twice.

That’s not a small thing. For a lot of Hunters, that’s the difference between a dream that dies in the underbrush and a dream that gets to be hunted.

But you know I won’t sell you hope without honesty, so let me plant a flag here: there’s a difference between hiring a Farmer and becoming dependent on one.

The machine is a magnificent tool for the Farmer’s work, the sorting and sequencing and drafting. But it isn’t a substitute for the Hunter’s judgment, and that’s the part I’d never want anyone to outsource.

The whole gift of the Hunter brain is the leap nobody else would make, the connection nobody else saw, the willingness to chase the strange idea across the clearing.

A machine that’s trained on everything everybody else has already done is, almost by definition, a Farmer. It’s good at the well-trodden path; it’s not the one who finds new country.

So use it to clear your road, by all means, but don’t let it decide where the road goes. Researchers poking at how well these tools actually design support plans have found the output can be coherent and useful but uneven, strong in places and shaky in others, which is exactly what you’d expect from an assistant who’s diligent but doesn’t really understand the hunt.

Check its work. Keep your hand on the wheel. It’s the plow, not the farmer who knows the land, and it is most certainly not you.

There’s an irony in all this that I can’t help savoring. For ten thousand years the Farmers ran the show, and the Hunters had to bend themselves into Farmer shapes just to get by, faking the orderly behaviors, taking the Farmer pills, apologizing for the piles.

Now, suddenly, the Hunters get to keep being Hunters and rent the Farmer skills by the hour. The thing the culture spent centuries shaming us for not having, we can now simply pick up off the shelf, and get back to the work our brains were actually built for. I don’t think we’ve begun to reckon with how much that’s going to unleash.

If you’re a Hunter who’s never tried this, I’d encourage you to start small and start today. Take the one task that’s been sitting on your list for three weeks, the one that’s not hard so much as it’s tedious and shapeless, and ask the machine to break it into the first three steps. Watch what happens when the underbrush clears and the hunt is suddenly right in front of you.

And then come tell me about it, because I want to know. Subscribe here and forward this to the Hunter in your life who’s still trying to do all the Farmer’s work alone. They don’t have to anymore. For the first time in human history, they really don’t.

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In 2025, Americans started more new businesses than in any prior year on record. 5.9 million of them, up 8 percent from 2024, in every single month outpacing the year before. That’s on top of 5.4 million in 2023, which was itself the previous record, which was itself part of a 47.8 percent surge above pre-pandemic levels. New business formation has been climbing now for five years straight, while traditional corporate hiring tightens and layoffs accelerate.

If you stop and look at that pattern carefully, something becomes obvious. We’re watching the largest mass shift away from Farmer work in modern American history, and almost nobody is talking about it in those terms.

I’ve been writing about Hunters in a Farmer’s world for thirty-three years, and it’s increasingly clear to me that the biggest validation of the framework isn’t going to come from neuroscience. It’s already coming from the labor market.

Let me lay out what’s happening, and why, and why, if you’ve got Hunter wiring, this is the most important economic moment of your life.

The traditional American Farmer career was a 20th-century invention. You went to school. You learned to sit still, follow directions, and produce predictable output. You graduated and went to work for a large organization that valued the same traits. You stayed there for decades, took the steady paycheck, made gradual upward moves, and retired with a pension.

The job was repetitive, but the structure was stable. Stability was the deal. You traded novelty for security, and most American Farmers thought that was a fair exchange.

That deal is coming apart, and it’s coming apart fast. Corporations are hiring less, restructuring more, and outsourcing the rest to artificial intelligence and gig labor.

The 30-year career at a single company is now a historical curiosity. The pension has been replaced by a 401(k) you have to manage yourself. The implicit promise that hard work and loyalty would be rewarded by long-term security has been broken in plain sight by company after company.

Younger workers can see this clearly. According to a recent Intuit QuickBooks survey of 3,000 American adults, 74 percent of Millennials feel a sense of urgency to start a business in 2026. 43 percent of Gen Z lead in entrepreneurial intent. 47 percent of American adults earned money from a side hustle in the past year, and most of them didn’t even register the business. They’re operating in what economists are starting to call the “invisible entrepreneur” economy.

What does it take to thrive in an economy like this?

Look at the list of skills: Scanning a constantly changing landscape for opportunities. Switching contexts rapidly. Spotting patterns nobody else has noticed. Acting on intuition before all the data is in. Tolerating high uncertainty. Bouncing back from setbacks fast. Working in short, intense bursts of focus on whatever’s hot at the moment. Being willing to abandon a project that isn’t working and pivot to a new one. Maintaining several income streams and several active projects at once.

That isn’t a Farmer’s skill list. That’s a Hunter’s skill list. That is, almost item-for-item, the cognitive profile of an ADHD brain.

The economy is reshaping itself around exactly the kind of nervous system that a hunting band would have valued. And the data on who’s actually starting these millions of businesses suggests that Hunters know it, even if they don’t yet have the language for what they’re feeling.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 report found startup rates at record levels in many regions of the world, with one of its core themes being “from uncertainty to opportunity.” Uncertainty makes Farmers anxious. Uncertainty is the air a Hunter breathes.

And AI is the variable that makes this shift permanent.

For most of the last fifty years, the Farmer’s biggest advantage was the ability to do repetitive, rule-based knowledge work consistently and reliably. Filing. Bookkeeping. Filling out forms. Writing standard reports. Following procedures. That work was the bedrock of middle-class American employment.

AI is now eating it. Every task that involves applying a known procedure to a known input is being automated, sometimes by people working alone with a laptop and a subscription. The Farmer’s traditional zone of competence is being industrialized away, the way handweaving got industrialized away when the power loom showed up.

Meanwhile, the things AI can’t do well are the things Hunters have always done well. Notice that the conversation has shifted. Sense the unspoken concern in the room. Read a market and know that a trend is about to break two weeks before the data shows it. Improvise a solution to a problem nobody has seen before. Keep three different framings of a question in mind at once and switch between them based on context. Take a creative leap that bypasses the obvious answer entirely.

AI doesn’t replace those capacities. AI augments them, in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. Hunters who learn to drive AI as a power tool become some of the most productive workers in human history. Farmers whose only skill was the procedural work AI has now automated face a much harder transition.

A personal note. I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my adult life. I’ve started a number of businesses, written more than three dozen books, hosted a national radio show for over twenty years, and helped build educational alternatives for ADHD kids who needed something other than the Farmer-shaped school system.

None of that came out of careful long-term planning. Almost all of it came out of seeing an opportunity, leaning in fast, learning by doing, and being willing to pivot when something wasn’t working. That’s how Hunter brains build careers. Not in a straight line, but in a series of leaps from one engaged project to the next, each one teaching you something you couldn’t have learned by sitting still.

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom said this was a foolish way to live. Get a real job. Stop bouncing between projects. Pick one thing and stick with it for forty years.

The conventional wisdom was wrong, and it was wrong because it was Farmer wisdom for a Farmer economy that doesn’t exist anymore. In the economy that’s actually arriving, the Farmer’s careful, single-track approach is becoming a liability. The Hunter’s restless, multi-track approach is becoming an enormous strength.

If you’ve got a Hunter brain and you’ve spent your life feeling like you couldn’t fit yourself into the standard career boxes, take this from the data. You don’t need to fit yourself in. The boxes are dissolving.

The economy is opening up exactly the kind of niches your wiring was built for. The 5.9 million Americans who started new businesses in 2025 are the early adopters of a much larger shift that’s just getting started, and a disproportionate number of them are almost certainly operating with the same kind of nervous system you have.

Start the side hustle. Take the freelance gig. Run the experiment. Stack two or three small income streams together and see what they teach you. Use AI to handle the procedural work that bores you, and put your real attention on the parts of your work where you can see things nobody else can see. Treat your shorter attention span as a feature, not a defect. The Farmer economy punished it. The Hunter economy is going to reward it.

The mismatch between Hunter brains and modern life that I’ve been writing about for decades was always a temporary historical accident. We had ten thousand years where Farmer-cognition fit the dominant economic structure. We’re now entering a period where that structure is changing, and the change favors exactly the kind of mind the schools tried to medicate out of you when you were eight years old.

If this resonates, share it with the Hunter you know who’s been quietly running their own experiments without permission. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. The rest of the world is starting to wake up to what we’ve known for a long time. Hunters were never the problem. We were the early indicator of what was coming.

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