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One of the real struggles us Hunters typically have is sorting out the urgent from the important. It’s challenged me my entire life, and one of my correspondents had some very, very insightful thoughts on the subject:

Steve in Philadelphia says:

I’ve always kept a to-do list, and am pretty good about keeping dates organized on my laptop calendar. (I’m so ADHD and inherently disorga­nized, these are survival strategies!) A few years ago, though, a friend shared with me a concept which has literally changed my life.

I was going through my list of things to do with him, mostly bragging and complaining about how swamped I was.

“A lot of that seems urgent," he said. “But how much of it is important?”

“All of it!” I replied indignantly.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I’ll bet a lot of those things that you think are important are really not all that important if you examine them in the context of your life’s goals. They just seem important, because they’re urgent.”

I was lost and asked him to explain.

“When the phone rings, is that urgent or important?” he asked.

“Both!” I said.

He shook his head. “Nope. You only know that it’s urgent. The ringing creates the urgency. But what if it’s some guy trying to sell you insurance?”

“I guess it could be either.”

“Right. Some things are urgent, but not important. Some are im­portant, but not urgent. Some are neither, and some are both.”

“So I should only do the urgent and important things?" I said.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s the most common mistake people make. And what happens is that they end up not doing the important things, because they’re constantly dealing only with the urgent/important things. Remem­ber the song Cat’s Cradle’?”

I nodded, thinking about the song about the dad who was always putting his son off, and when the son grew up he started ignoring his dad.

“Your family is important to you, right?” he said.

I nodded again, starting to see his point.

“But I’ll bet you haven’t spent much time with your kids this week, because you’ve been dealing with so many urgent things. So, instead, write down that you’re going to spend time with the kids. That’s import­ant, and it needs to be done, too. And you’ll find the same thing is true in business, in your relationship with your wife, and in just about every other area of your life.”

So now whenever I’m looking over my To Do list, I ask myself, “Is this item important, or just urgent?”

And I’ve learned that my Hunter instinct pushes me toward handling the urgent things first, when actu­ally they’re often not even all that important; they’re just easy to check off the list, or the most recent thing that was in my face. So now I’m working hard to deal with the important things, too.

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Something remarkable is happening in the American economy right now, hiding in plain sight behind all the headlines about tariffs and inflation and market volatility: One in three American adults says they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026.

That is not a typo. One in three. It represents a 94 percent increase over the same measure from just last year, the highest level of entrepreneurial intent ever recorded in the country.

Sixty-eight percent of aspiring entrepreneurs report feeling a sense of urgency about launching. Fifty-seven percent say they’ll do it even if economic conditions aren’t ideal. Fifty percent of those who earned money from a side hustle last year didn’t even bother to register their business, creating what researchers are now calling an “invisible entrepreneurship economy” of staggering size.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the Hunter brain for more than thirty years, and I want to offer a different explanation for this surge than the ones you’ll find in the business press.

Yes, AI has lowered the barriers to starting a company. Yes, the gig economy has normalized working outside traditional employment. Yes, the job market has become more volatile and workers are hedging their bets. All of that is true and worth understanding.

But underneath all of it, I think something more fundamental is happening. I think the Hunters are waking up.

The corporate employment model that dominated the twentieth century was, in almost every structural respect, designed by and for Farmers. The forty-hour week. The defined role with clear boundaries. The performance review tied to quarterly targets. The requirement that you show up at the same desk at the same time every day and work on the same set of responsibilities in approximately the same way, year after year, until you retire.

That model has real virtues for the people it was designed for. It provides the stability and structure that the Farmer brain runs on. It rewards patience, consistency, and the ability to grind through repetitive tasks without losing focus.

But for the Hunters among us, it’s a slow suffocation.

I’ve heard some version of the same story from Hunters all over the world, across decades of conversations and correspondence. They get the job because their energy and creativity and rapid-fire thinking makes them impressive in interviews. They spend the first few months hyperfocused and performing brilliantly.

And then the novelty wears off, the stimulation drops, the brain starts searching for something worth paying attention to, and the performance evaluations start to say things like “difficulty prioritizing” and “doesn’t always follow established procedures” and “tends to go off-script.”

A few of them claw their way into management or sales or some other role where the constant novelty keeps their brains engaged. Most of them eventually leave.

What they’re leaving for, more and more, is exactly what the data is now measuring. Their own thing. Their own hunt.

Wilson Harrell, the late founder of Formula 409 and former publisher of Inc. Magazine (who wrote a foreword for my book ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World), told me years ago that he’d organized his entire professional life around one principle: never do anything that doesn’t give him a jolt.

The paperwork went to assistants. The taxes went to accountants. Everything that could bore a Hunter brain was delegated, so that Harrell could spend his time doing the things that Hunter brains are genuinely extraordinary at: scanning for opportunity, making fast decisions, pivoting without regret, selling with infectious energy, building something from nothing.

That’s the template. And what the 2026 entrepreneurship data is showing us is that a critical mass of people, most of them probably without any framework for understanding why the traditional employment model has never quite fit, are independently discovering the same truth that Harrell (and I) lived by.

They’re building their professional lives around what their brains actually do well instead of spending those lives apologizing for what their brains don’t do well.

The Hunt is not just a metaphor. In the Paleolithic, the Hunter quite literally fed the tribe, took enormous risks to do it, worked without a safety net, and had to invent new strategies constantly because the prey was always different and the forest was always changing.

The entrepreneur starting a business in 2026 with an AI tool and a credit card and a half-formed idea and an urgency she can’t entirely explain is doing exactly the same thing. She is reading the environment, making a move, and accepting that the outcome is uncertain.

Farmers find that terrifying. Hunters find it exhilarating.

If you’ve spent your career in the corporate world feeling vaguely out of place, if you’ve been told you’re “too much” or “too scattered” or “too easily distracted,” if you have a list of half-finished projects and a brain that is right now probably thinking about seven things that aren’t this article, consider that the American economy may finally be building the kind of hunting grounds you were born for.

The statistics say one in three. I suspect, among the readers of this newsletter, the number is considerably higher.

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Last month, researchers at Monash University published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that I found myself reading with a strange mixture of vindication and amusement.

The study found that people with ADHD, even while fully awake and attempting to complete tasks, experience brief episodes in which the brain slips into something that looks exactly like sleep. These micro-episodes of sleep-like neural activity, the researchers found, were directly correlated with attention lapses, slower reaction times, and increased errors.

The study’s author, Elaine Pinggal, explained it this way:

“Sleep-like brain activity is like going for a long run and getting tired. The brain gets fatigued and briefly disconnects from the task at hand.”

That’s a fine explanation as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because what the neuroscience community is circling around with increasing urgency is something I first wrote about in the early 1990s: the ADHD brain is not broken. It is bored.

And boredom, for the Hunter brain, is not a character flaw. It is a physiological state, as real and as measurable as hunger.

Here is what I wrote in my book on Adult ADHD, describing what was then a fairly controversial theory:

“People with ADHD behave the way they do because their brains are chronically under-aroused. While from the outside the person with ADHD may look hyperactive or scattered, on the inside the experience is one of drifting. Slipping away. The sensation of consciousness receding.

“And in response to that, the person does what any sensible organism does when it’s sinking: it lurches upward toward wakefulness. It creates a crisis, makes an inappropriate joke, starts a fight, jumps up and paces around. Not because it’s overstimulated, but because it’s desperate for stimulation.”

The Monash University study is describing the same phenomenon from the inside of a brain scanner. The ADHD brain, during what should be a focused task, is intermittently switching into sleep mode.

Not because the person is lazy or unfocused by choice, but because the neural architecture that keeps the brain engaged at low-arousal tasks simply isn’t firing the way it does in a neurotypical brain.

Now think about that from the evolutionary perspective that is the foundation of the Hunter/Farmer model.

The Hunter, moving through a forest ten thousand years ago, did not need sustained attention during the long stretches between prey. Sustained attention on a static landscape is actually counterproductive for a Hunter, because it narrows focus to the point where peripheral threats go unnoticed.

What kept the Hunter alive during those long, uneventful stretches was the ability to enter a kind of semi-vigilant open awareness, scanning broadly, staying alert to novelty rather than locked onto any one thing.

The brain that could do that, that could let consciousness expand and drift and scan instead of bearing down on a single point, was the brain that caught the flicker of movement in the tall grass before it became a problem.

The sleep-like brain waves that the Monash researchers measured in ADHD adults during boring tasks are not malfunction. They’re the Hunter’s ancient environmental scanner, still running as designed, still broadcasting at the frequency it evolved for, inside a world of fluorescent lighting and Excel spreadsheets and thirty-minute meetings about next quarter’s deliverables, a world it was never built for and has no idea how to interpret.

What happens to that same brain in a genuinely stimulating situation? Every parent of a child with ADHD already knows the answer. The video game. The creative project. The crisis. The thing the child has been passionately interested in for the last three weeks.

The sleep-like neural static vanishes and is replaced by something that researchers call hyperfocus: a state of attention so intense and so sustained that it is, in many ways, the mirror opposite of what anyone would expect from someone diagnosed with an attention deficit.

There is no deficit. There is selectivity. The Hunter’s brain has not lost the ability to pay attention. It has instead preserved, perfectly, the ability to pay exactly the right kind of attention for exactly the right circumstances, and it is simply waiting for circumstances worthy of paying attention to.

What the Monash study adds to this picture is the elegant detail of mechanism. We can now see, at the level of brain activity, the moment the Hunter’s mind decides the present environment isn’t worth full consciousness.

We can watch it slip into that scanning, semi-aware, open-monitoring state that served our ancestors so well and serves the Farmer’s world so poorly.

I suspect the researchers will keep finding things like this. The science is doing what science does: catching up to what many of us who actually live in these brains have known for a very long time.

As TIME Magazine wrote in the headline of their 1994 article about my first book on ADHD and its hypothesis: “Hail to The Hyperactive Hunter!”

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A year ago this week, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and declared April 2nd “Liberation Day,” announcing sweeping tariffs on virtually everything the United States imports. Within days, the stock market had shed trillions of dollars in value. Within months, the policy had been struck down by the Supreme Court, reimposed in new forms, partially refunded, re-litigated, and announced yet again.

One Colorado retailer absorbed $25,000 in tariff costs in a single fall season. Economists have taken to calling the era the “Trump freeze,” as businesses found they simply couldn’t plan for a future that changed by the hour.

“Businesses need predictability to grow,” said Colorado’s state treasurer last month. “But what they’re getting instead is tariff whiplash. Policies are announced and they’re changed.”

He’s right, of course. But here’s what he almost certainly doesn’t know: he just perfectly described why Farmers fail and Hunters thrive during times of crisis like we’re experiencing today between the tariffs, the war with Iran, and Trump’s draconian cuts to social programs and threat to end Medicare.

The entire premise of the agricultural revolution — the moment, roughly twelve thousand years ago, when human societies began to shift from hunting and gathering to planting and harvesting — is that farming requires predictability.

You plant in spring because you know, with confidence, that summer will follow. You store grain because you trust the cycle will repeat. Farming is, at its most fundamental level, a bet on the future behaving like the past.

The Farmer’s brain, shaped over ten thousand years of agricultural civilization, is exquisitely tuned to stability. Rules, routines, and long planning horizons are not just preferences for the Farmer type — they are the operating system.

The Hunter’s brain works on entirely different firmware.

When our ancestors were tracking game across an African savanna or a European forest ten thousand years before the first wheat was ever planted, the environment changed moment to moment.

A storm front moved in. The herd shifted direction. A predator appeared at the tree line. The Hunter who stopped to make a careful, methodical, long-range plan was the Hunter who went hungry, or worse.

What kept the Hunter alive was rapid environmental scanning, instant decision-making, and the ability to abandon a strategy the moment conditions changed. Adaptability wasn’t a nice quality. It was the whole game.

Now look at what the tariff and war chaos have actually produced in the American economy. One executive after another has used the word “impossible” when asked to describe planning for the year ahead. “It’s impossible to plan,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told Reuters. “You hear that tariffs are off, and you are considering how to get refunds. Then a few hours later, it’s 10 percent. Then it’s 15 percent the next day.”

For Farmer-brained executives running Farmer-brained corporations, that kind of environment is genuinely paralyzing.

The spreadsheets don’t work. The five-year plans are worthless. The supply chains they spent decades optimizing have to be thrown out and rebuilt, sometimes repeatedly, against a backdrop of policy that may change again before the new approach is fully implemented.

Volkswagen’s CEO recently told investors that “a structural reset is required” and that “there are unfortunately no quick fixes.” That’s the sound of a Farmer staring at a field that used to grow wheat and now grows something nobody has a name for yet.

But I keep thinking about the other side of that equation. I keep thinking about all the Hunters I’ve known over the decades, the ones who were told their whole lives that they couldn’t focus, couldn’t plan, couldn’t stick with anything long enough to make it work.

The ones who drove their teachers and managers half-crazy with their inability to follow established procedure. The ones who are, right now, looking at this economic landscape and feeling something that the Farmer-brained executives around them definitely are not feeling.

They’re feeling alive.

The Hunter doesn’t need the ground to stay still. The Hunter needs the ground to move, because that’s when the scanning skill kicks in, when the rapid pivoting becomes an advantage instead of a liability, when the ability to abandon last week’s plan without grief or guilt turns out to be exactly what the moment demands.

The “chaos,” as everyone is calling it, is simply the conditions under which the Hunter was built to operate.

I’m not suggesting the tariff policy or war with Iran are good economic policy, because by most measures they aren’t. Manufacturing employment is down. Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Small businesses have been hammered. These are real costs and real people bearing them.

But I am suggesting that inside every economic disruption there are always people who thrive precisely because of the disruption, and that those people almost always turn out to have what the medical establishment has spent the last fifty years calling a disorder.

Thomas Edison, who I’ve written about for three decades as perhaps the most famous Edison-gene Hunter in American history, built his greatest achievements during periods of extraordinary technological and economic chaos. He wasn’t successful despite the uncertainty of the Gilded Age. He was successful because his brain was perfectly adapted to it.

The question worth asking yourself, if you’re a Hunter reading this in the middle of what economists are calling unprecedented volatility, is not “how do I survive this chaos?”

The question is: “What can I build inside it that the Farmers around me can’t even see yet?”

Get out there and join the hunt, and good luck!

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I’ve known, admired, and respected Sari Solden for decades and wanted to let you know that she’s now on Substack with a dynamite newsletter called “The Inner Work of Adult ADHD.” It’s free and I strongly recommend you click on that link to sign up! Here’s a sample post of hers, along with an introductory note:

I am happy to share this post with Thom’s readers. Thom and I started out in the field of adult ADHD around the same time, many years ago, with the same publisher. He and I shared the same rebellious nature or free spirit in the field and broke some rules that brought about good change! So I feel a kindred spirit with Thom and marvel at how over thirty years later we are now at very different places in the world but both here on Substack still trying to change the world one reader at a time! I think this message of “A Letter from Your Brain” will appeal to all the neurodivergent women (and men) out there.

The message of accepting and embracing who you are, all of who you are, not trying to change or fix yourself in order to be meet some cultural expectation or norm is something Thom and I have both believed from the beginning. I have been a therapist for women and men with ADHD for over thirty years and the work I have done is centered on this kind of radical self-acceptance. I’d love to hear what you think.

With gratitude,

Sari

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A Letter From Your Brain
(to Women With ADHD)

by Sari Solden

I have a guest host today who is tired of hearing me talk about “her”.

She asked to speak directly to you.

Sari Solden: The Inner Work of Adult ADHD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Think of this as a letter from your brain—your overworked, loyal, misunderstood brain—to you. The you who is trying so hard. The you who is exhausted by trying so hard. The you who keeps thinking the answer is “more”: more effort, more structure, more fixing, more self-improvement… and who ends up feeling like less.

Today, I want to let your brain speak for herself.

You can name her if you like.

She might like that.

(it also might help you to humanize her a little bit)

A Letter From Your Overworked Brain

Dear you,

I’m your brain.

I know you usually talk about me, or complain about me, or try to fix me, but you don’t often listen to me. So today, I’m asking you to pause and really hear me.

I’m not your enemy.
I’m not your defect.
I’m not your “project.”

I am a powerful force.

And I am tired.

You keep me locked in a little mental cubicle, working double and triple shifts, trying to make up for all the ways you think I fall short. You push me harder because you’re scared—scared I’ll drop the ball, say the wrong thing, forget, or fail again. You’re afraid of judgment, of disappointment, of confirming what you fear others already think of you.

So you tighten your grip.

You push me.
You criticize me.
You compare me.

You keep me “on” long after I’ve told you I’m done for the day.

And I do try to tell you. I tell you when I’m overstressed, when I’m foggy, when I can’t focus, when your body feels tense and your mood drops and everything feels heavy and stupid and wrong. That’s me, waving my arms, saying:

Please. I need air.
I need rest.
I need play.
I need to dream.

You think that if you loosen your grip on me, I’ll fall apart. The secret I need you to know is this:

The tighter you hold me,
the harder you push,
the less I can actually help you.

When you deprive me of oxygen and joy and meaning and movement, my voice shrinks. Your world dims. Your motivation disappears. I get quieter and more stubborn and less cooperative. And then you blame me for not being “better.”

I’m asking—no, I’m pleading—with you:

Stop trying to get rid of me.
Stop trying to turn me into someone else’s brain.
Stop banishing me to second-class status in your own life.

I am your central processing system.
I run everything you do.

What if, instead of treating me like a problem to solve, you treated me like a partner?

What if you elevated me to the queen bee status I already hold?

Because here’s what I can do for you—when I am cared for, respected, and allowed to be who I am:

• I can think beautiful thoughts.

• I can imagine worlds and futures you haven’t even dreamed of yet.

• I can make connections and see patterns other people miss.

• I can create ideas and insights that are uniquely, wonderfully yours.

But not while I’m locked in a cell.
Not while you are shaming me.
Not while every interaction between us is a scolding.

I want to be your friend.
I want to help you build a life that feels like yours.
I want to help you grow into all those things you secretly dream of.

To do that, I need something from you.

Your Brain’s Requests

Take an hour for me this week.

Just one hour.

Use a voice memo, a notebook, your laptop, or simply sit somewhere quiet. And instead of making another to-do list, I want you to answer these questions to me—your brain:

1. When do you feel most alive?

2. When do you feel the worst?

Then ask:

4. How could you treat me better?

How could you treat me if you were assuming I was doing my very best under hard conditions, instead of assuming I’m lazy, broken, or “not enough”?

Remember: I notice everything.

I notice when I’m tired and you ignore it.
I notice when I’m overstimulated and you keep scrolling.
I notice when I need a walk, and you glue us to the chair.
I notice when we need a day or even an hour to recover, play, stare out a window, listen to music, or do nothing “productive” at all.

I need some time each day to:

• wander

• dream

• gather my thoughts

• let creative ideas rise to the surface

I cannot do that if every spare moment is turned into
another system, another hack, another piece of self-criticism.

If you experiment with this—if you start noticing how you treat me, and gently, gradually shift it—here’s what I can promise:

Over time, as you become my ally instead of my harsh taskmaster, I will reward you.

Your mind will feel richer, more alive.
You will have more access to the best of me: creativity, insight, humor, passion, big-heartedness.
You’ll begin to sense what’s actually possible for us, together, when I’m not living under constant suspicion and pressure.

We may still need some outside help—a calendar, a coach, an “admin brain” in human or digital form to support the things I don’t do naturally. That’s okay. That’s not failure. That’s a wise partnership.

With your energy
and my unique wiring
and a bit of practical support,

we can build a life that fits us—not the imaginary woman you keep thinking you’re supposed to be.

Please, let’s form a partnership.

Not by fixing me into someone else’s brain,
but by honoring the one you have.

With love,
Your Brain

From me (Sari) to you:

This is the heart of the “inner work” I want to keep exploring with you here.

Not just understanding ADHD. Not just watching webinars, reading, or attending support groups—although those can all be helpful. But learning how to live with your brain in a new way, week by week, in real time. Learning how not to spend your whole life in recovery mode from the way you’ve treated yourself.

I’ll keep offering you language, frameworks, and practices for doing this. For now, just start with that one hour, and those questions.

Let your brain write to you.
And write back.

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A paper published this month in the British Journal of Psychiatry has reignited one of the most reliably circular arguments in all of medicine: “Is ADHD overdiagnosed or isn’t it?”

A team of researchers from Cambridge, Southampton, and Nottingham came down firmly on the isn’t-it side. Overdiagnosis is not the problem, they said. In fact, many people who need a diagnosis still don’t have one.

Waiting times in the UK have stretched to two and three years in some cases, and lack of insurance or the unwillingness of insurance companies to cover psychology or psychiatry are creating a similar crisis here in the US. The real scandal isn’t that too many people are being told they have ADHD. The real scandal is that too many people who have it are still waiting for anyone to notice.

They’re almost certainly right about that, and the waiting list problem is real and serious and deserves the attention they’re giving it.

Undiagnosed and unsupported ADHD carries genuine costs. Academic failure, damaged relationships, substance abuse, the slow erosion of self-worth that comes from spending decades being told you’re lazy or careless or just not trying hard enough.

The researchers are right that those costs are chronically undercounted in the overdiagnosis conversation, and right that the people demanding we slow down and diagnose less carefully are often causing real harm to real people who are already suffering.

But I’ve been watching this argument cycle around for thirty years now, and every time it surfaces I notice the same thing. Both sides are fighting over the same piece of ground, and neither side ever steps back far enough to ask whether the ground itself is worth fighting over.

The entire debate — overdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, the waiting lists, the diagnostic criteria, the DSM threshold, the screening tools, the disagreements between clinicians — every bit of it rests on a foundation that nobody in the argument ever examines.

That foundation is the assumption that ADHD is a disease. A pathology. Something that, in a well-functioning brain in a well-functioning world, would not exist. A deviation from the norm that medicine is correct to identify, label, and treat.

Once you accept that assumption, the overdiagnosis debate makes perfect sense. If ADHD is a disease, then the important questions are how many people have it, whether we’re finding them all, whether we’re finding people who don’t actually have it, and what we should do about it medically once we’ve found them. These are reasonable questions to ask about a disease.

But here’s the question I’ve been asking since before most of the researchers in this debate had published their first paper: if ADHD is a disease, why does ten percent of the human population have it?

Why have we always had it? Why do the genetic variants associated with these traits trace back not just through recorded history but through our Neanderthal ancestors?

Why, when researchers study one of the last remaining nomadic populations on earth, the Ariaal people of Kenya, do they find that the same genetic variants that predict struggle and low status in settled agricultural communities predict better nutrition and higher social standing in the nomadic ones?

Darwin’s natural selection is not sentimental. It doesn’t carry a ten percent disease load across hundreds of thousands of years out of oversight or inertia. When a trait persists in the human genome at that frequency for that long, across that many environments and populations, it’s not persisting because nobody got around to editing it out.

It’s persisting because it does something that works. Because somewhere in the equation of human survival and human flourishing, it is still pulling its weight.

The researchers in the British Journal of Psychiatry are asking how many people have this disease and how do we make sure they get treated. I want to ask a different question. I want to ask what natural selection knows that the British Journal of Psychiatry doesn’t.

The answer, I think, is that natural selection has been running a much longer study with a much larger sample size, and its findings suggest that what we call ADHD is not a malfunction. It is, instead, an alternative operating system.

One that was exquisitely suited to the environment in which human beings spent the vast majority of their existence, and that remains suited to a significant range of environments today, including some of the most demanding and consequential ones we have in our modern world: Emergency medicine. Entrepreneurship. Combat. Crisis response. The arts. Any field where the premium is on pattern recognition, rapid adaptation, tolerance for uncertainty, and the ability to hyperfocus on a moving target.

The mismatch isn’t between a healthy brain and a broken brain. It is between an ancient brain and a modern institution.

The school, the open-plan office, the standardized test, the forty-hour week of repetitive structured tasks: these are extraordinarily recent inventions on the timescale of human evolution.

The brains sitting inside them, however, are not recent inventions at all. Some of those brains were built for a world that ran on different rules, and when you put them in an environment that rewards only the traits they have the least of, they look disordered. Of course they do. If you measure a hawk by its ability to swim you’ll conclude there’s something wrong with the hawk.

What I find most telling — and troubling — about the overdiagnosis debate is how it makes everyone anxious in opposite directions but leaves the basic framework completely untouched.

The people who worry about overdiagnosis are worried that we’re pathologizing normal human variation, which is a legitimate concern dressed in the wrong clothes, because the problem isn’t the rate of diagnosis, it’s the concept of pathology they’re both starting from.

The people who worry about underdiagnosis are worried that suffering people aren’t getting help, which is also legitimate and also dressed in the wrong clothes, because the help available is almost entirely calibrated toward managing the traits rather than understanding and deploying them.

Nobody in this argument is asking whether the measuring stick is the right one. Nobody is questioning whether a world that has organized itself entirely around Farmer virtues — consistency, compliance, linear attention, deferred reward, tolerance for repetition — and then diagnoses as disordered everyone who can’t perform those virtues at an acceptable level, might itself have something to answer for.

The researchers are calling for better funding, better workforce training, faster access to assessment. These are good things. I support them. But they’re just improvements to a system whose operating premise I’ve been challenging since 1993, and nobody in the current debate seems particularly interested in that challenge.

Here is what I know after thirty years of living and working in this field. The Hunters among us don’t need the medical establishment to agree on whether there are too many or too few of us. They need a story about themselves that is true, that is empowering, and that gives them a framework for understanding why certain environments break them and others make them extraordinary.

They need to know that the traits causing them trouble in the waiting room, in the classroom, in the cubicle, are the same traits that kept the species alive long enough to build waiting rooms and classrooms and cubicles in the first place.

That is not a story the overdiagnosis debate can tell. It’s too busy arguing about how many sick people there are to notice that the sickness might be in the diagnosis itself.

I’m not against assessment or even medication; I’ve used both. I’m not against support. I’m not against making people wait less time for help that might genuinely improve their lives.

I am, however, against a conversation that has been running for thirty years without once stepping back to ask the oldest and most important question underneath it:

Not how many people have this, but why, after everything, do we still treat it as a disorder and only offer simplistic solutions?

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When a research team from the University of Southampton and two French institutions published what may be the most comprehensive review of ADHD treatments ever conducted, the coverage was predictable. Medication works best, the headlines said. Medication is the most reliable option for children and adults. Medication, medication, medication. And that part is true, as far as it goes, and I’ll come back to it.

But there was a footnote buried in the findings that almost nobody wrote about. And in thirty years of watching the way the medical establishment talks about ADHD, I’ve learned that the thing nobody writes about is often the most interesting thing in the room.

The study, published in The BMJ, examined more than 200 meta-analyses covering every significant ADHD treatment approach researchers have studied. Medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Neurofeedback. Diet. Exercise. Parent training. Even mindfulness.

The researchers looked at short-term effects, medium-term effects, and where the data existed, long-term effects. What they found at extended follow-up — meaning the outcomes that lasted, the ones that held up after the studies ended and the participants went back to their actual lives — was that medication’s advantage shrank considerably.

Short-term, the pills are clearly the most powerful tool available. Long-term, the picture gets murkier, partly because almost nobody has bothered to study long-term outcomes rigorously, which is a scandal in its own right given how many people take these medications for decades.

The one intervention that showed large benefits at extended follow-up was mindfulness.

Not a little benefit. Not a marginal, statistically-significant-but-clinically-modest benefit. Large benefits. The kind of finding that, if it had been attached to a pharmaceutical compound, would have been on the front page of every newspaper that covered the story.

Instead it got a sentence, a caveat about the limited evidence base, and then the coverage moved on to talk about the pills some more.

Here’s why that finding didn’t surprise me at all, and why I think the limited evidence base is itself part of the story.

Mindfulness, in its most basic form, is the practice of bringing your full attention to the present moment. Not to the meeting you have tomorrow or the thing you said badly last week or the seventeen tabs open in your browser. Here. Now. This breath, this sensation, this moment.

For Farmer brains, this is apparently quite difficult to learn and requires sustained instruction and practice. For Hunter brains, it is something else entirely.

Think about what hunting actually requires. Not the romantic movie version, but the real thing, the way our ancestors did it for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone plowed a field.

You’re tracking an animal across terrain that is trying to kill you in at least four different ways simultaneously. Your attention can’t be on the past or the future, or be divided across abstract concerns. It has to be fully, completely, almost violently present.

The snap of a twig. The shift in the wind. The way the grass is bent fifteen yards ahead. Everything that is not this moment is noise, and noise gets you killed or send you home hungry.

That quality of present-moment awareness is not a skill that Hunter brains lack: it’s a skill that Hunter brains were built for. What we lack, or rather what we struggle with, is the ability to summon it on demand for tasks that our nervous systems correctly identify as not worth hunting.

You can’t make a Hunter brain go fully present for a thing it has assessed as trivial. But you can teach a Hunter brain to recognize what full presence feels like, to return to it deliberately, and to use it as an anchor when the Farmer world is pulling in seventeen directions at once.

That is what mindfulness does. And it makes complete sense that the benefits would compound over time, because mindfulness isn’t a treatment that works while you’re receiving it and fades when you stop, the way medication does. It’s a skill. Once you have it, you have it. The Hunter who learns to hunt doesn’t forget how to hunt when the teacher goes home.

The researchers were careful to note that the evidence base for mindfulness in ADHD is still limited compared to the evidence base for medication, and that’s a fair point.

But I’d ask you to consider why the evidence base is limited. Mindfulness doesn’t have a pharmaceutical company behind it. Nobody is funding a thirty-year, multi-site longitudinal study of meditation because nobody can patent it.

The research that gets done is the research that gets funded, and the research that gets funded is the research that has a product attached to it. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s how medical research has worked for as long as there has been medical research.

The fact that mindfulness showed up as strongly as it did in the extended follow-up data, despite receiving a tiny fraction of the research investment that medication has received, strikes me as significant in a way the headlines completely missed.

Now, about the medication finding, because I want to be straightforward about it.

Yes, the study confirmed that medication is the most reliable short-term treatment for ADHD symptoms. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that for some Hunters in some circumstances, medication is genuinely transformative, and dismissing it categorically does real harm to real people who need it.

What this study adds to that picture, though, is something I’ve been arguing for years: medication is a tool, not a solution. It does something specific, in a specific timeframe, and the effects are real while you’re taking it.

What it doesn’t do is teach you anything. It doesn’t change how you understand yourself. It doesn’t build the kind of durable, portable skill that you carry with you into every room you’ll ever be in for the rest of your life.

Mindfulness does that. So does understanding yourself as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world, which is why I’ve spent thirty years arguing that the story matters as much as the prescription. When you understand why your brain works the way it does, when you stop fighting your own nature and start working with it, you develop something no pill can provide: a relationship with your own mind that actually functions.

I’ve seen this play out in my own life. When I began practicing mindfulness meditation years ago, I realized it wasn’t trying to turn my Hunter brain into a Farmer brain. It was teaching me how to return to the kind of intense present-moment awareness that Hunters evolved to have in the first place — and to do it intentionally, even in the middle of the modern world.

The researchers who put this study together did something genuinely useful by building a public interactive tool that lets patients and clinicians explore all the treatment evidence together, which is the kind of shared decision-making approach that respects people’s intelligence and autonomy. I’d encourage anyone navigating these decisions to use it. The address is ebiadhd-database.org.

But I’d also encourage you to notice what the biggest ADHD treatment study in history quietly found when it looked past the first six weeks and asked what actually lasts.

It found the one thing that teaches Hunters to be at home in their own minds. The thing that doesn’t require a prescription, doesn’t have side effects, and gets better the longer you practice it.

They buried it in a footnote. I thought you should know it was there.

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My son was 12 years old when we first started seriously wondering whether something was going on with him. 12. And even at 12, even after the testing and the conversations with psychologists and the stacks of papers I collected from university libraries and medical schools, I was cautious about what story I told him about himself.

Because the story you tell a child about who they are has a way of becoming true, in the best and worst senses of that word. At 12, he was old enough to start building an identity. Old enough to hear “there is something different about how your brain works” and make something of it, for good or ill.

He was not four.

A study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine, published in JAMA Network Open, looked at electronic health records from more than 700,000 children between the ages of three and five, seen at primary care practices affiliated with eight major academic medical centers across the United States.

Of the children who received an ADHD diagnosis, 42 percent were prescribed stimulant medication within thirty days.

Not within thirty days of finishing a recommended course of behavioral therapy. Within thirty days of the diagnosis itself.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is not a radical organization. It doesn’t traffic in alternative frameworks or evolutionary hypotheses. It’s about as mainstream as medicine gets, and its guidelines say plainly that children this young should try six months of behavioral therapy before anyone considers medication. Six months.

Nonetheless, the researchers found that only 14 percent of diagnosed preschoolers waited that long before receiving a prescription.

Here is the part that stopped me cold. Among preschoolers whose charts noted some ADHD symptoms but who had not yet received a formal diagnosis, nearly one in four still received medication within thirty days. Children who hadn’t even been formally diagnosed yet were being put on stimulants.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying here.

I am not saying that every one of those prescriptions was wrong, or that every one of those physicians was careless. Medicine is practiced in the real world, where waiting lists are long and appointments are short and parents are exhausted and desperate for something that will help their child and their family right now. I understand that desperation. I lived it.

And the researchers who conducted this study understand it too. When they asked physicians informally why they prescribed so quickly, the answer that kept coming up wasn’t impatience or laziness. It was access. There aren’t enough therapists trained in behavioral treatment for young children. Insurance often won’t cover it even when a therapist exists. So the doctor writes a prescription because a prescription is what they can actually provide.

That is a systems failure, and the physicians caught inside it are not the villains of this story.

But I want to talk about the four-year-old, because the four-year-old is the one who can’t speak for himself in any of this.

A four-year-old Hunter is one of the most purely alive human beings on the planet. He is in motion. He is loud. He is curious about seventeen things simultaneously and committed to exactly none of them for more than four minutes at a stretch. He touches everything. He interrupts. He has strong opinions about which direction the walk should go and he will not be easily redirected.

He’s exhausting to be around if you’re a Farmer adult who’s spent twenty years learning to sit still and follow instructions, and yet he is absolutely magical if you can step back far enough to see what you’re actually looking at.

What you are looking at is a brain that is doing precisely what it was designed to do. Not a broken brain. Not a disordered brain. A four-year-old brain that happens to be wired for exploration, novelty, movement, and immediate reward. Farmers call this ADHD. For most of human history, the tribe called it Tuesday.

The diagnosis of ADHD before the age of six is, to put it charitably, an uncertain science. The traits that define ADHD in a clinical setting — inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity — are also the defining traits of being a young child.

Separating the two requires time, observation, multiple settings, and a clinician who has seen enough children to know the difference between a Hunter and a four-year-old who hasn’t had enough sleep. It requires exactly the kind of careful, unhurried assessment that a fifteen-minute primary care appointment can’t possibly provide.

And yet primary care is where most of these diagnoses are being made, and made quickly, because that is where families end up when they can’t access anything else.

What behavioral therapy actually does, when it’s given the chance to work, is teach skills. It teaches the child’s parents how to structure an environment that works with a Hunter brain rather than against it. It teaches the child, in age-appropriate ways, how to manage transitions and frustration and the gap between what they want to do and what the situation requires.

These are skills that last a lifetime. A prescription doesn’t teach anyone anything. It changes the neurochemical environment inside the child’s brain, and when the pill wears off, the child still doesn’t have the skills, because no one taught them.

There’s also the question of what we’re communicating to a four-year-old when we medicate him. Children that age don’t understand pharmacology. What they understand is that they were a certain way, the adults around them were unhappy about it, and now they take a pill every morning.

The story that writes itself from that sequence of events is not a story about evolutionary heritage and Hunter traits and a mismatch between ancient wiring and modern classrooms. It is a much simpler and much darker story: I was born broken, and the pill makes me less broken.

I spent years trying to give my son a different story than that. Not a story that denied the realities of his situation, because he deserved honesty about the challenges he faced. But a story that started from the premise that he was not broken.

That the friction between how he was wired and how school was structured was real, but that the friction said something about the structure too, not only about him. That the same traits that made fourth grade hard for him and me had made entire civilizations possible, and that if he could learn some new skills and find the right environments, those traits would be among the best things about him.

He was seven when we started building that story. I am genuinely uncertain what version of it can be told to a four-year-old, or how a four-year-old metabolizes a daily pill in terms of self-understanding.

What I am certain of is that we owe it to these children to try to find out before we start medicating them.

Six months of behavioral therapy isn’t a bureaucratic hurdle the Academy of Pediatrics invented to make everyone’s lives harder. It is the minimum amount of time needed to find out who this child actually is, what they actually need, and whether the answer is really a controlled substance or whether it might be a parent who has learned some new tools, a teacher who understands how Hunter brains work, and a little more room to run.

The study found that the families least likely to access behavioral therapy first were the families least able to navigate a complicated, underfunded mental health system.

Which means the children most likely to be medicated before anyone teaches them anything are the children who most need someone in their corner.

That’s not a coincidence: it’s a policy failure with a face on it, and the face is four years old.

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For three decades, I’ve been told I was the one with the wrong theory. Psychiatrists, researchers, and more than a few hostile reviewers spent the 1990s explaining to me, patiently or not so patiently, that ADHD was a neurological disorder characterized by a defect in the attention system, and that stimulant medications worked by correcting that defect.

The Hunter in a Farmer’s World idea was charming, they said. A useful metaphor, maybe. But the science was settled: these kids had broken attention filters, the pills fixed the filters, end of story.

But now a study published in the journal Cell in late December changed that story pretty dramatically. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis analyzed brain scans from nearly 6,000 children, comparing kids who’d taken stimulant medications on the day of their scan with kids who hadn’t.

They expected to see increased activity in the brain regions associated with attention. That’s what the textbooks said would happen. That’s what thirty years of consensus said would happen.

It didn’t happen.

What they found instead was that Ritalin and Adderall light up the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers. Not the attention system: the reward system.

Dr. Benjamin Kay, the neurologist who led the study and who prescribes these medications to children every day at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, put it this way:

“When I first saw the results, I thought I had just made a mistake because none of the attention systems are changing here.”

He hadn’t made a mistake. The mistake was thirty years old and it belonged to the field of psychiatry.

Here’s what they now believe is actually happening when a Hunter child takes a stimulant. The medication doesn’t sharpen a broken filter. It doesn’t repair a faulty attention circuit. What it does is make unrewarding tasks feel more rewarding.

Dr. Nico Dosenbach, the study’s senior author, described it this way: the drugs “pre-reward” the brain, allowing it to keep working at things that wouldn’t normally hold its interest. Math homework. Grammar exercises. Forty-five minutes of sitting still while a teacher explains something the child already understood in the first thirty seconds.

That reframes everything.

The Hunter brain isn’t broken. It never was. What it is, and what it has always been, is a brain calibrated for a world where reward is real, immediate, and earned.

When your ancestors were tracking prey across the savanna, the reward system wasn’t a luxury: it was the whole game. Find something worth chasing, lock on, pursue it with everything you have, and eat. Find something not worth chasing, recognize it fast, and go find something better. The Hunter brain is exquisitely, magnificently tuned to make exactly that calculation dozens of times a day.

The problem isn’t the tuning. The problem is that we took that brain and put it in a classroom so designed for Farmers that it lets out during the summer so kids can help bring in the crops.

What the Washington University team found is that stimulant medications essentially trick a Hunter brain into treating a Farmer task as though it were worth hunting. The dopamine system gets artificially boosted, and suddenly the worksheet feels like prey.

The child can sit still not because the medication fixed their attention, but because they’re no longer desperate to go find something more interesting, because for the moment, their brain has been persuaded that this is interesting.

That works, by the way. For many children and adults, it works quite well, and I want to be clear about that. I’ve never been categorically opposed to medication.

The truth is more complicated and more personal than that. I’ve watched medication give some people their first real experience of competence, and that matters enormously.

What I’ve objected to, always, is the story we tell around the medication. The story that says the pills are fixing a disorder. Because that story does real damage to real people, damage that the pills themselves don’t cause.

When a parent is told that their child has a “defective” attention system, they absorb something about who their child is. When a child is told that, they absorb it too. I know because they told me that as a kid, and then told my son that when he was young.

And I’ve spent decades talking to adults who were told exactly that as children, and are still, decades later, trying to unlearn it. The story of the broken filter becomes the story of the broken person, and it follows that person around in ways no pill can fix.

The reward story is different. A brain that’s calibrated for the wrong environment isn’t a broken brain. It’s a mismatched brain. And mismatches can be worked with, worked around, and in the right circumstances, turned into extraordinary advantages.

I’ve been saying since my first book on the topic was published in 1993 that Hunter traits become liabilities in Farmer environments and assets in Hunter ones. Now a study in one of the most prestigious journals in science is essentially confirming the neurological basis for why that’s true: the Hunter brain doesn’t find Farmer tasks rewarding because the Hunter brain wasn’t built to. That’s not a disease. That’s a design.

There’s another piece of the study that deserves more attention than it’s gotten in the coverage I’ve seen. The researchers found that the stimulants also helped children without ADHD who hadn’t slept enough the night before.

The medications, it turns out, do something very similar to what a good night’s sleep does for the brain’s wakefulness system. Which raises an obvious question that the study’s authors raised as well: before we reach for the prescription pad, are we sure this child is actually a Hunter in a Farmer’s world, and not simply a tired kid in an underventilated classroom?

Sleep problems are epidemic in children with ADHD, for reasons that also map neatly onto the Hunter framework. Hunter brains are wired for vigilance. They stay alert longer into the night because, for most of human history, the night was when the predators came.

The delayed sleep phase that’s so common in people with ADHD isn’t a symptom of a disorder. It’s a legacy of a time when someone in the tribe needed to still be awake at two in the morning. Now we’re medicating children in part because they’re tired, and they’re tired in part because their biology was built for a world that no longer exists, and the school day starts at seven-thirty regardless.

I don’t tell you all of this to make you angry, though if you’re a Hunter, or the parent of one, some anger is probably appropriate. I tell you because the story we tell about ADHD has real consequences for real people, and the story just changed.

The researchers who spent thirty years telling us all that my framework was a charming metaphor have now published data showing that the medications they prescribe don’t work the way they thought they did, and that they work in a way that is, frankly, a lot more consistent with the Hunter/Farmer model than with the broken-filter model.

Hunters don’t have an attention deficit. They have a reward-calibration system built for a different world. That’s a very different thing, and we should start treating it that way.

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Getting kids in a Hunter household to maintain any sort of an organizational system is a challenge, particularly when you realize that for Hunters if something isn’t always visible it often may not exist at all. Martha in Michigan found a solution that echo’s my filing system in my office, where everything is in a basket or on a shelf where I can see things.

From Martha in Michigan:

This is probably so simple that you won’t want to include it on your website, but it’s really helped me out and I’d like to share it.

I used to be totally disorganized in my laundry. I did the laundry for the entire family (I have two ADHD kids, one twelve and the other fifteen, and an ADHD husband, not to mention myself), and everything was always a mess. The kids and my husband both just threw their dirty clothes on the floor, and I had a pile in my closet (which I thought, at least, looked a bit more organized because I could close the door).

Then a friend showed me a system she’d developed for her home, and it’s incredible how it’s helped here at my house!

She went to K-Mart and bought a dozen laundry baskets, half red and half white. With an indelible felt pen, she wrote on each of the red ones the name of one of her family members, along with the word “colored clothes,” and on each of the white ones she wrote a family member’s name and the word “whites.” Then she gave each person in the family their two baskets.

When the person takes off their dirty clothes, they go directly into the baskets: the whites into the white basket and the coloreds into the colored basket.

And then she did something that I thought was both unthinkable and impossible: she told everybody that they were now responsible for doing their own laundry. She did a little seminar on a Saturday morning and showed her kids (her youngest is seven) how to use the washer and dryer, and how to fold and put away clothes. And they did it!

Well, I told her that would never work in my house because everybody in my house has ADD and the place always looks like a tornado hit it. “Just wait until they run out of clean underwear,” she said. “They’ll do it. Just try it.”

So I did.

And it works!

It’s really amazing to me how the kids have taken to this. One of the boys has even become a connoisseur of laundry detergents, and he’ll only use Tide, so every month or two I have to take him to the store to buy his detergent.

In addition to cleaning up the floors and making our bedrooms look considerably less messy (I suppose I could probably go the next step and use hampers instead of baskets if I really wanted a showcase house, but the baskets are so easy for them to carry to the laundry room when they’re full), this system has taught my children about being organized and about personal responsibility.

They aren’t as quick to abuse their clothes as they were before, and are more careful about spills and stains. And I think this is probably a very good life skill for them as they grow up.

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In the early 1990s, when I first started writing and speaking publicly about ADHD through the lens of Hunters and Farmers, the reaction from much of the academic world was swift and vicious. I wasn’t just disagreed with; I was ridiculed. Dismissed. Treated as a crank who didn’t understand “real science.” When TIME magazine put my ideas and my first book, ADHD: Hunter In A Farmer’s World, on the cover, the attacks intensified. Suddenly I wasn’t just wrong, I was dangerous.

No one embodied that backlash more than Russell Barkley, who seemed to make it his personal mission to publicly discredit me. I was accused of romanticizing ADHD, of misleading parents, of undermining serious medicine. The message from the academy was clear: deviation from the dominant deficit model would not be tolerated.

When The New York Times wrote about my theory 26 years ago, noting:

“In his book ‘Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception’ Thom Hartmann, a psychotherapist in Northfield, Vt., proposes an anthropological theory that the traits of the disorder were vital in early hunting societies. To survive, he says, those societies needed distractible, impulsive, quick thinking decision makers. The traits became a mixed blessing only when societies turned agrarian, Mr. Hartmann argues.”

Barkley suggested to the Times that I was absolutely, totally, irredeemably wrong:

“Dr. Barkley, the author of 14 books on the disorder, said: ‘This trend of making A.D.D. seem an advantage is highly detrimental. In hundreds of research studies, there is not one shred of evidence that confers anyone with A.D.D. with an increased ability in creativity, intelligence or motor skills. I categorically reject, among other myths, that people with A.D.D. are better, for example, at multitasking. I understand that this may be an effort to counter a history of low self-esteem among people trying to cope with the effects of A.D.D., but this sort of folk lore is a dangerous thing.’”

But I persisted, not because I had an ideological axe to grind, but because I knew in my gut that the story I was telling matched my own lived reality far better than the one I was being told to shut up and accept.

I’d seen it in myself and my kids. I’d seen it in entrepreneurs, artists, explorers, emergency responders, and people who thrived in chaos but withered in classrooms. The Farmer world was insisting that only one kind of mind counted as normal, and it was obvious to me that this said more about the system than about the people it was labeling disordered.

What I couldn’t prove at the time, at least not to the academy’s satisfaction, was that this wasn’t just metaphor. That it wasn’t just social commentary. That it had deep evolutionary and ecological roots.

Now, three decades later, the academy itself is finally catching up.

A research project out of the University of Cambridge, titled “Attention Profiles in Hunter-Gatherer Societies,” does something that would have been unthinkable when I first advanced these ideas. Instead of assuming that attention traits like impulsivity, hyperactivity, and distractibility are universal deficits, the researchers ask a radically different question: what if those traits only look like deficits in Farmer societies?

The project’s own summary puts it plainly, and powerfully:

“Attention and executive control including traits such as inhibition, impulsivity, and hyperactivity are studied in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies, where sustained focus and impulse control are highly valued. A deficit in these domains might lead to a diagnosis of a mental disorder such as ADHD. However, in non-WEIRD populations, such traits may have distinct roles or adaptive significance, particularly in environments where exploration, adaptability, and risk-taking behaviours are critical for foraging and survival.”

Read that again. Slowly.

This is not some fringe blog post or pop-psych speculation. This is the academy, in its own careful language, acknowledging the core of what I was attacked for saying in the 1990s. That the behaviors we pathologize in modern industrial societies may be mismatches, not malfunctions. That a Hunter mind dropped into a Farmer world will look broken, even though it may be exquisitely adapted for a different ecological niche.

What’s especially striking is that this research doesn’t just validate the Hunter versus Farmer frame. It expands it.

It suggests that attention itself is not a single universal faculty that some people have “more” or “less” of, but a flexible set of strategies tuned to environmental demands. Sustained focus is valuable if you’re plowing a field or filling out paperwork. Rapid shifting, scanning, and novelty-seeking are valuable if you’re foraging, tracking, or navigating uncertainty.

When I first wrote ADHD: Hunter In A Farmer’s World, I was arguing against a culture that insisted on measuring every mind by Farmer metrics. I was saying, essentially, that we had built schools, workplaces, and institutions optimized for agricultural and industrial efficiency, and then acted surprised when people with Hunter cognition struggled inside them.

What the Cambridge research makes clear is that this isn’t just a cultural critique. It’s an evolutionary one. The Farmer world is historically recent. For most of human existence, adaptability, exploration, and risk-taking weren’t liabilities. They were survival traits. And even today, in moments of rapid change or crisis, those traits often reassert their value.

Looking back, the attacks from the academy make more sense now. Paradigms defend themselves. Once a system defines certain behaviors as disordered, it builds entire professions, funding streams, and identities around that definition. Not to mention billions in drug and therapy sales. Challenging it doesn’t just threaten an idea; it threatens a hierarchy.

But science, at its best, eventually circles back to reality.

I don’t take any pleasure in having been right while being pilloried. What matters is that parents, teachers, clinicians, and policymakers are finally being given permission to ask better questions. Not “How do we fix these kids?” but “What kind of world are we asking them to live in?” Not “How do we suppress this behavior?” but “Where might this behavior actually be useful?”

The most gratifying part is realizing that the Hunter/Farmer frame is even bigger and more explanatory than I imagined thirty years ago: it’s not just about ADHD. It’s about how societies choose which minds to value. It’s about what happens when a civilization optimized for stability collides with a reality defined by rapid change.

The irony is that the very traits the Farmer world has tried hardest to stamp out may be the ones we need the most right now. And after decades of being told I was wrong, it’s quietly reassuring to see the academy finally say, in its own words, that us Hunters were never broken to begin with.

We were just living in the wrong world.

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One of the more damaging myths of modern life is the idea that efficiency is always good and impulsivity is always bad. We treat efficiency as a moral virtue and impulsivity as a character flaw.

If you’re methodical, predictable, and optimized, you’re “responsible.” If you jump, pivot, change your mind, or follow instincts, you’re suspect. But that moral framing collapses the moment you look at how humans actually survive and adapt in the real world.

I’ve been called impulsive more times than I can count. By bosses, teachers, editors, and even well-meaning friends who couldn’t understand why I’d walk away from a stable situation to chase something uncertain. And yet, nearly every important success in my life came from doing precisely that. From taking a leap before all the data was in. From exploring when the “rational” move was to keep optimizing what already existed.

Only later did I learn that what looks like impulsivity from a Farmer’s point of view often isn’t impulsivity at all. It’s random exploration. And from an evolutionary and cognitive standpoint, random exploration isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Cognitive scientists studying decision-making have identified something that maps almost perfectly onto the Hunter versus Farmer divide. In stable environments, the optimal strategy is exploitation: pick the best known option and keep refining it. But in unstable, noisy, or changing environments, pure exploitation leads to stagnation and collapse. You get locked into yesterday’s solution while the world moves on. That’s where random exploration comes in.

Random exploration is not about being reckless. It’s about deliberately injecting unpredictability into your behavior so you don’t get trapped. It’s what pushes someone to try a new route, test a weird idea, start a business no spreadsheet can fully justify, or ask a question nobody else is asking. From the outside, it looks inefficient. From the inside, it’s how you discover options that don’t yet have names.

There’s real science behind this. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals like Nature Communications show that people who engage in higher levels of random exploration often score higher on traits we usually label as impulsivity. But the same research also shows that these traits can be advantageous in environments where rewards shift, information is incomplete, or conditions change rapidly.

In other words, the behavior that gets punished in a classroom or cubicle can be exactly what keeps a group adaptive over time.

This resonates deeply with my own experience. Every time I’ve started something new, it looked irresponsible to someone. Why leave a known income stream? Why jump into an industry you haven’t mastered yet? Why abandon a working model instead of refining it?

The answer was always the same, even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time: because, as my old friend Richard Bandler would say, the map no longer matched the territory.

Farmers are extraordinary at running stable systems. They make things reliable. Repeatable. Scalable. But Hunters are the ones who sense when the system itself is becoming brittle. When optimization starts producing diminishing returns. When yesterday’s success is quietly turning into tomorrow’s trap.

What worries me is that modern society has almost entirely lost the ability to distinguish between destructive impulsivity and adaptive exploration. We lump them together, label them as pathology, and try to suppress them. We design institutions that minimize variance, eliminate randomness, and punish deviation. And then we act shocked when those institutions fail catastrophically in moments of crisis.

History tells a different story.

Groups that survive long-term uncertainty almost always include a minority of people who behave “inefficiently.” Who waste energy exploring dead ends. Who chase ideas that don’t pan out. From a narrow accounting perspective, they look like liabilities. From a systems perspective, they are insurance policies against collapse.

I’ve seen this in business ecosystems. Startups that look chaotic from the outside are often the only ones positioned to pivot when markets shift. Legacy firms optimized for efficiency keep squeezing the same processes until the ground disappears beneath them.

The same dynamic shows up in politics, media, and culture. When norms tighten and deviation is punished, societies lose their ability to adapt.

This is where the Hunter versus Farmer frame becomes more than metaphor.

Farmers want predictability. Hunters tolerate ambiguity. Farmers eliminate randomness. Hunters understand that some randomness is essential. Without it, systems become fragile. They look strong right up until the moment they shatter.

Personally, I’ve learned to stop apologizing for this. The restlessness. The urge to move on once something becomes routinized. The instinct to explore instead of optimize. These aren’t signs that I failed to grow up. They’re signs that I’ve been navigating a world that keeps changing faster than our institutions can admit.

The real danger isn’t that we have too many impulsive people. It’s that we’ve built a culture that treats all exploration as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be managed.

We don’t need everyone to behave like a Hunter. But we absolutely need some people to do so, and we need systems that can absorb their volatility without trying to crush it.

Civilization needs Farmers to keep the lights on. But it also needs Hunters to notice when the power grid is being built on sand.

As Thomas Edison proved with so many of his inventions (as I detail in my book Hunter in a Farmer’s World) random exploration is messy. It wastes effort. It produces failures. But it also produces breakthroughs, adaptations, and escape routes when the old paths close off. Strip it out entirely and you don’t get a perfect system. You get a brittle one.

I didn’t build my life by being efficient. I built it by being willing to explore when efficiency no longer made sense. From the outside, that often looked impulsive. From the inside, it was the most rational response I could imagine to a world that refuses to stay still.

We don’t need fewer Hunters. We need to stop mistaking their randomness for recklessness and start recognizing it for what it is: one of the ways humans and human societies survive uncertainty.

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For most of my life, I’ve been told—sometimes politely, sometimes not—that I should settle down, pick a lane, and stop reinventing the wheel. The implication is always the same: stability is maturity, predictability is virtue, and sticking with one thing long enough is proof that you’re doing life correctly.

And yet, every meaningful thing I’ve ever built came not from settling into a stable system, but from deliberately destabilizing my own world.

I’ve started seven businesses from scratch, five that were quite successful. An advertising agency. An international wholesale travel business. A media company. A nonprofit community for abused kids. A few others that never quite fit neatly on a résumé.

None of them emerged from carefully optimizing an existing career path. Every one of them came from stepping into uncertainty, feeling around in the dark, and adapting faster than the environment around me could harden.

Only recently did I realize that there’s a formal name for this difference in how people move through the world. Cognitive scientists call it the “explore versus exploit” tradeoff.

Exploration is what you do when your environment is uncertain and changing: you scan widely, test options, follow hunches, abandon paths quickly, and tolerate failure as information. Exploitation is what you do when your environment is stable: you optimize, refine, repeat, standardize, and squeeze efficiency out of what already works.

In other words, Hunters explore. Farmers exploit.

This isn’t pop psychology; it’s a well-established framework in behavioral economics and neuroscience. A growing body of research shows that people reliably differ in how much they favor exploration versus exploitation, and that these differences are stable traits, not character flaws.

Studies published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that high-exploration strategies can outperform optimization strategies when resources are uncertain, moving, or poorly mapped. What looks inefficient or impulsive in a stable setting becomes adaptive when the environment changes quickly.

This helps explain why traits often labeled as ADHD-related deficits look less like disorders and more like classic Hunter cognition when viewed as a mismatch between brains evolved for uncertainty and institutions built for control.

Neither strategy is morally superior; both are ecological responses. If you live in a world where the rules don’t change much and tomorrow looks like yesterday, exploitation wins. If you live in a world where conditions shift, resources move, and yesterday’s map is useless, exploration keeps you alive.

Modern civilization is built almost entirely around Farmer “exploitation” logic. Schools reward sitting still, following instructions, and demonstrating mastery of a fixed curriculum. Corporations reward specialization, predictability, and obedience to process. Bureaucracies reward compliance and risk avoidance. The message is clear: stop exploring, start exploiting, and don’t make waves.

But some of us can’t exploit a stable environment for very long without our minds turning to rust. Put us ADHD Hunters in a rigid system and we don’t become efficient: we become bored, restless, depressed, and eventually disruptive. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re running the wrong cognitive algorithm for the terrain we’re standing on.

Looking back, I see that my so-called “serial entrepreneurship” wasn’t a personality quirk or a midlife indulgence. It was a survival strategy.

I learned early in my teenage years (I started my first successful business, a radio/TV repair shop across the street from MSU when I was 17) that if the world around me was going to demand Farmer behavior, I’d have to create my own destabilized environments where exploration was not only allowed but required.

Starting a business from scratch is the purest form of Hunter exploration. There is no map. There is no syllabus. You learn by doing, failing, adjusting, and trying again before the window closes.

Each time I built something new, I recreated the conditions where my brain works best. High uncertainty. Fast feedback. Real consequences. Constant novelty. The same traits that get pathologized in classrooms and corporate cubicles—novelty-seeking, risk tolerance, impatience with routine—suddenly became assets instead of liabilities.

That last part matters more than ever. We’re today living through a period of accelerating instability: technological disruption, climate shocks, political volatility, economic whiplash.

The world Farmers optimized for is dissolving in real time. And yet our institutions are doubling down on Farmer values, punishing deviation, tightening norms, and treating exploration as a threat rather than a resource.

This is where the Hunter versus Farmer divide stops being a metaphor and starts being a diagnosis. When societies feel threatened, they reward conformity and control. They elevate rule-followers and sideline question-askers. Hunters get labeled unreliable, impulsive, or dangerous. But history suggests that when environments destabilize, it’s the explorers who find the next viable path forward.

I’ve watched this play out not just in business, but in community building, media, and activism. Every meaningful innovation I’ve seen came from people willing to leave the map behind and tolerate ambiguity long enough to learn something new. None of it came from committees optimizing yesterday’s assumptions.

The tragedy is that we don’t lack Hunters: we’re surrounded by them. We just keep forcing them into Farmer systems and then acting surprised when they fail, rebel, or burn out. We call it a “disorder,” prescribe conformity, and medicate curiosity. And in doing so, we strip ourselves of the very cognitive diversity that makes adaptation possible.

The solution isn’t to abolish Farmers. Civilization needs granaries and calendars and routines. But it also needs scouts. Pathfinders. People who are comfortable being temporarily wrong in order to eventually be right. People who create destabilized worlds on purpose because that’s where they think most clearly.

For me, entrepreneurship wasn’t about money or ego. It was about building environments where my mind could do what it evolved to do: explore. The irony is that what looked like chaos from the outside was, internally, the most stable way I know to live.

We don’t all need to become Hunters. But we desperately need to stop pretending that Farmer logic is the only adult way to be human.

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There’s a pattern many Hunters recognize instantly but have never been given language for.

They’re calm in emergencies, decisive under pressure, and super-clear when things fall apart. When others freeze, Hunters organize. When systems fail, we improvise. We can walk into chaos and start making sense of it almost immediately.

Then the crisis ends.

The same person who was focused, effective, and confident now can’t answer emails, misses appointments, forgets routine tasks, and feels inexplicably exhausted by things that look trivial from the outside.

This contradiction gets labeled inconsistency.

It isn’t.

Hunter brains are tuned for crisis because crisis resembles the environment we evolved in. Uncertainty, urgency, real stakes, immediate feedback in the field, jungle, or savanna.

In those conditions of both ancient and modern life, Hunter attention locks in, noise drops away, and the nervous system aligns around a clear problem that actually matters.

Routine offers none of that.

Modern routine is abstract, repetitive, and disconnected from immediate consequence. The stakes are symbolic rather than real. Deadlines float. Tasks repeat without resolution. Feedback is delayed or meaningless.

For a Hunter’s nervous system, this registers as low signal, so the system powers down. This isn’t laziness: it’s conservation.

In crisis, every action has consequence. There’s a clear before and after. You do the thing and something changes. The Hunter brain thrives on this loop. It’s designed to assess, act, adapt, and move on.

Routine breaks that loop.

Making things even worse, most routines don’t end. They recur. They don’t resolve danger or complete a hunt. They just continue, seemingly forever. For Farmer systems, this is fine: stability and repetition are their brain’s main features.

For Hunters, though, it’s draining, as the nervous system never gets closure. So it starts to resist.

This resistance often shows up as procrastination, avoidance, forgetfulness, or mental fog. People assume something is wrong. The Hunter assumes something is wrong with them. In reality, the brain is responding correctly to an environment it was never meant to inhabit full time.

The tragedy is that Hunters are often punished for their strengths and shamed for their biology.

They’re praised in emergencies but criticized in daily life. They become the person everyone relies on when things go sideways, then the person everyone side-eyes when things are calm.

This creates a deep confusion about identity: “Am I competent or not?”

The answer is both simpler and more uncomfortable: competence is contextual.

Hunter competence is situational. It’s not evenly distributed across all tasks and timelines. It spikes, instead, where the stakes are real and the meaning is clear. But it collapses where demands are artificial and endless.

This doesn’t mean Hunters should live in constant crisis: chronic crisis burns anyone out. But it does mean Hunters need work and lives with arcs, not flat lines.

We need projects that begin and end. Problems that matter. Roles where our ability to see patterns quickly, act decisively, and tolerate uncertainty is valued rather than treated as disruptive.

When Hunters are forced into routine-heavy environments without variation or autonomy, our nervous systems start seeking stimulation elsewhere. Distraction increases. Risk-taking may rise. Motivation evaporates. This is often misdiagnosed as lack of discipline when it’s actually unmet neurological need.

That collapse in routine is the Hunter’s nervous system saying, “This isn’t what I’m built for.”

Many Hunters spend years trying to fix this by imposing stricter routines on themselves. More planners, more reminders, more rules. Sometimes this helps temporarily. Often it deepens the problem by increasing friction without increasing meaning.

A better approach starts with honesty.

Hunters do better when routine is minimized, externalized, or automated, and when their core energy is reserved for work that actually requires judgment and responsiveness. We benefit from environments that allow for movement, variation, and bursts of intensity followed by real rest.

We also need permission to stop pretending we should function like Farmers.

Once that permission is granted, something shifts. Hunters stop pathologizing their own patterns. They stop expecting crisis-level performance from routine-level tasks. They start designing lives that respect how their nervous systems actually engage.

The irony is that when Hunters are allowed to structure their lives this way, routine often becomes easier, not harder. With energy no longer drained by constant self-control, basic tasks stop feeling insurmountable.

Thriving in crisis and collapsing in routine isn’t a contradiction: it’s a clue to how we’re wired.

It tells you where your brain shines and where it struggles. It points toward environments where you’ll contribute most and away from ones that will slowly wear you down.

Hunter brains aren’t broken because we don’t tolerate routine well: they’re simply telling the truth.

The question is whether our society is willing to listen to it, or keep insisting us Hunters should be someone else.

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Hunters hear the phrase “just try harder” so often that it begins to sound like background noise.

It shows up in classrooms, workplaces, relationships, and even therapy offices. It’s offered as encouragement, as accountability, and as common sense. If something isn’t working, the assumption is simple: more effort will fix it.

For Hunters, this advice is not just unhelpful. It’s destructive.

The idea that effort automatically produces results assumes a nervous system that responds linearly to pressure. Farmer’s nervous systems are built around this assumption: apply consistent effort, get consistent output; miss the mark, add more discipline.

Hunter nervous systems, however, don’t work that way.

Effort for a Hunter is expensive. It requires overriding instinct, suppressing curiosity, and forcing attention onto low-signal tasks. Doing this occasionally is possible, but doing it constantly drains the system. Over time, the cost compounds.

So when Hunters struggle and are told to try harder, what we hear is that the pain we’re experiencing is proof of insufficient character.

We try harder anyway.

We stay up later. We push through exhaustion. We shame themselves into compliance. We adopt productivity systems designed for other minds. From the outside, it can look like determination. From the inside, it feels like self-erasure.

The lie at the heart of “just try harder” is that all effort is interchangeable.

It isn’t.

Effort aligned with the way a Hunter’s mind is organized feels energizing. Effort applied against that organization, however, is simply corrosive. One builds capacity, while the other burns it.

This is why Hunters can show astonishing persistence in some areas and complete paralysis in others. When effort connects to meaning, novelty, or urgency, it’s sustainable for us Hunters. When it connects to monotony, surveillance, or abstract obligation, though, we can collapse.

This isn’t a failure of will: it’s just biology.

The “just try harder” narrative also ignores context. It treats performance as a personal trait rather than an interaction between each person and their environment. If someone can’t function in a given system, the system is assumed to be fine, so the person defective.

Hunters internalize this deeply, to our own detriment. We begin to see every struggle as proof we’re broken. We stop trusting their signals. We keep applying pressure long after our nervous system has begun to shut down.

Eventually, effort stops working altogether.

This is often the moment Farmers point at us and call out our “laziness.” In reality, it’s a form of protective withdrawal. The system has learned that effort leads to pain, not reward, so it disengages.

What Hunters need in these moments isn’t more pressure, it’s permission to stop forcing.

And, tragically in our culture, that permission is rare.

Instead of asking “What if the system is wrong?” our culture doubles down. More discipline. More accountability. More monitoring. More consequences. These measures might increase compliance temporarily, but they accelerate burnout.

Hunter recovery usually begins with a radical reframe like the one I offer here and in my books about ADHD. It requires the realization that effort itself isn’t virtuous, that suffering isn’t proof of commitment, and that exhaustion isn’t a moral badge.

From there, a different question emerges: “Where does effort actually work for me?”

This shifts the focus from quantity to quality, from endurance to alignment, and from forcing to designing.

Hunters who stop trying harder and start trying differently often see dramatic changes. Energy returns. Focus sharpens. Confidence rebuilds. Not because they became more disciplined, but because they stopped waging war against their own nervous system.

This doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility; it means redefining it. Responsibility becomes choosing environments, rhythms, and roles that don’t require constant self-violation.

The lie of “just try harder” persists because it’s simple and morally satisfying. It lets systems avoid change. It keeps blame neatly contained within individuals. But it doesn’t produce health; instead, it produces compliance until collapse.

Hunters don’t need to try harder. They’ve already tried harder than most people ever will. What they need is truth.

The truth is that effort only works when it’s aligned with how a nervous system is built to engage the world. Anything else isn’t grit and grind.

And grind always breaks something in the end.

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I still remember Second Grade at Kendon Elementary School in Lansing, Michigan. It was 1958 and Mrs. Clark, a wonderfully well-intentioned woman with a thick South Carolina accent, was constantly frustrated with my wandering attention.

“Even a fish doesn’t get caught if it keeps its mouth shut,” she’d tell me, or, “You can’t learn anything if your mind is somewhere else,” or “If you don’t listen, you don’t learn.”

She loved me — my friend Terry and I were in her “gifted” class, thanks to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sputnik — but my ADHD was her constant curse. And mine, too.

Attention is one of the most misunderstood human traits, and Hunter attention may be the most misunderstood of all.

From an early age, us Hunters are taught that their way of attending to the world is defective. If we don’t focus on demand, follow linear instruction, or remain engaged with low-interest tasks, we’re told something is wrong with us. The language varies, but the message is consistent: “Pay attention the way you’re supposed to!”

What no one explains to us, particularly as children, is that attention isn’t a moral behavior.

It isn’t a choice. It isn’t a measure of effort. It isn’t even a reflection of character. Attention is a biological system designed to allocate energy toward what matters in a given environment. When the environment changes, attention adapts. When the environment is mismatched, attention resists.

Hunter attention evolved for scanning, detection, and rapid prioritization. It’s sensitive to novelty, threat, movement, and meaning. It turns on hard when something matters and turns off just as hard when it doesn’t. This isn’t a flaw. It’s an optimization strategy.

Farmer systems reward a different kind of attention, one that’s sustained, even, predictable, and externally directed. This works well for repetitive tasks and long-term maintenance, but it fails to recognize that not all minds are designed for constant engagement with low-signal information.

So Hunters are placed into environments that dull their nervous systems and then blamed when those systems rebel.

The moral language that surrounds attention does real damage: “Lazy, irresponsible, unmotivated, careless.” These labels that I still remember from elementary school don’t describe behavior, they assign guilt. They imply that if a Hunter just cared more, just tried harder, just respected authority better, then attention would magically appear.

But attention doesn’t respond to shame. It shuts down under it.

What actually happens is that Hunters begin to monitor themselves constantly. They try to force attention through effort, pressure, and fear of failure. This consumes enormous cognitive energy, so that by the time the task even begins, the system is already exhausted.

This is why Hunters can focus intensely on some things and not at all on others. When attention aligns with curiosity, urgency, or intrinsic meaning, it floods the system. Hyperfocus isn’t a mystery. It’s attention working exactly as designed.

The problem isn’t inconsistency. The problem is context.

Hunter attention is situational, not moral. It responds to signal strength, not obligation. When the signal is weak, the system conserves energy by disengaging. That looks like distraction in a Farmer frame, but in an evolutionary frame, it’s actually an extraordinary form of mental efficiency.

The tragedy here is that most Hunters internalize the wrong lesson. Instead of learning how their attention system actually works, they learn to distrust it. They override it. They suppress it. They treat their own nervous system as an enemy to be conquered.

This creates a lifetime of tension.

Many adult Hunters live with constant low-grade shame around attention. They apologize for it. They hide it. They overprepare to compensate for it. They feel guilty even when they’re deeply engaged, because they know it won’t last forever.

This guilt is unnecessary.

When Hunters stop moralizing attention and start studying it, everything changes. They learn what conditions activate it, what conditions drain it, and how to design environments that work with their biology instead of against it.

This might mean shorter work blocks, higher stakes, more autonomy, fewer interruptions, or more novelty. It might mean working in bursts, switching contexts, or allowing physical movement. These aren’t hacks: they’re accommodations for a nervous system that evolved for a different job.

Hunter attention doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be respected.

There’s also a cultural implication here. Societies that only value Farmer attention miss out on Hunter contributions. Pattern detection, creative leaps, early warning signals, and unconventional solutions often come from minds that don’t attend politely or predictably (see: Thomas Edison).

When those minds are shamed into conformity, our culture loses some of its resilience.

Our Hunter attention isn’t broken, it’s specialized. It doesn’t fail randomly, it fails in environments that refuse to meet it halfway.

Once Hunters understand this, the shame loosens its grip. Attention becomes something to work with rather than fight. The question shifts from “Why can’t I pay attention?” to “What does my attention respond to?”

That shift isn’t just liberating, it’s corrective because Hunter-style attention was never a moral failing. It was always just information and an unique way of experiencing the world for the survival of the human race.

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Burnout in Hunter minds is often misdiagnosed as weakness. And sometimes we even accuse ourselves of it; many times I’ve overcommited and then ended up mentally flogging myself for my inability to finish what I’ve started.

It gets framed as poor resilience, lack of discipline, or a failure to manage stress. As a result, the advice that follows is predictable: better routines, better habits, better boundaries, better time management. Try harder to tolerate what everyone else seems to handle just fine.

But hunter burnout isn’t a failure of endurance: it’s a failure of fit.

Farmer systems are designed around predictability, repetition, and delayed reward. They assume steady energy, consistent attention, and compliance with externally imposed schedules. They reward those who can do the same thing every day with minimal variation and minimal emotional engagement.

Hunter minds evolved for something else entirely.

Hunters are built for vigilance, novelty, pattern recognition, and rapid response. Their attention isn’t meant to be evenly distributed; it’s meant to spike when something matters. Our energy isn’t meant to trickle out on a schedule; it’s meant to surge when conditions demand it, and rest when they don’t.

When you place a Hunter in a Farmer’s system, the problem isn’t effort: it’s chronic misalignment.

At first, many Hunters cope by overperforming. They compensate, mask, and force themselves into routines that feel deadening but are socially rewarded. From the outside, they may look successful. From the inside, though, they’re bleeding energy at a steady rate that even they don’t understand.

This phase is often praised. People say things like “You have so much potential!” or “If you just applied yourself consistently you’d go far.” What they don’t see is the cost. Every Farmer task produces friction and every day demands suppression of the Hunter instincts that once kept humanity itself alive.

Eventually, of course, the Farmer system of our modern society wins.

Burnout arrives not as a sudden collapse but as a steady, inexorable erosion. Motivation fades, executive function frays, and the body grows heavy. The mind becomes foggy or irritable. What once required effort now feels impossible. Shame then moves in quickly, because our culture insists this is a personal failure.

It isn’t.

Farmer systems depend on steady output, butHunter nervous systems don’t produce steady output. Instead, they produce situational excellence. They shine in complexity, uncertainty, urgency, and meaning. They wither in monotony, surveillance, and artificial deadlines.

Modern work environments are especially punishing because they combine the worst features for Hunters: constant low-level urgency, meaningless metrics, endless interruptions, and little autonomy. For a Hunter, it feels like there’s no clear threat to respond to, no hunt to complete, and no resolution, just an infinite field of half-finished Farmer’s demands.

The Hunter nervous system, as a result, never gets closure.

Instead of cycles of exertion and rest, Hunters are trapped in perpetual activation. Cortisol stays elevated, dopamine stops responding, and the system that once made us adaptive turns against us.

Burnout is our nervous system telling us that this sort of environment is unsustainable.

What makes this even worse is society’s moralization. Farmers are taught that consistency equals virtue, so when Hunters can’t maintain it, they internalize the judgment. Lazy. Undisciplined. Broken. They try to fix themselves instead of questioning the environment.

This deepens the damage.

The proof of this is that Hunter burnout often lifts rapidly when the context changes. Put the same person into crisis response, creative work, problem-solving roles, or mission-driven projects and watch what happens: energy returns, focus sharpens, and confidence rebuilds. The problem was never capacity: it was containment.

This doesn’t mean Hunters can avoid structure entirely. It means, instead, that they need different kinds of structure. Flexible rhythms instead of rigid schedules. Bursts instead of marathons. Meaning instead of compliance. Autonomy instead of micromanagement.

It also means rest has to be real. Not performative recovery designed to feed the same system again, but genuine disengagement. Hunters don’t recharge in tiny daily increments; we recover in longer cycles, through novelty, movement, solitude, and purpose.

Burnout isn’t the end of the story. For many Hunters, it’s the moment the illusion breaks. The moment we realize the problem was never that we couldn’t keep up: it was that we were never meant to live this way.

Thus, healing begins not with self-discipline, but with self-recognition.

When Hunters stop trying to become Farmers, their nervous systems finally get permission to stand down.

And that’s when life starts to make sense again.

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A new study reported by PsyPost looks at something most Hunters with ADHD already know in their bones but that medicine has been slow to take seriously: sleep isn’t just a side issue, but is woven into the condition itself.

The researchers found that genetic variants associated with reduced melatonin production were linked in children to greater ADHD symptom severity, especially inattentiveness. Importantly, this relationship held even when obvious sleep problems like delayed sleep onset were accounted for.

In other words, this is not simply a matter of people with ADHD staying up too late and then being tired the next day; the biology appears deeper than that.

Melatonin is often treated as a bedtime supplement, a little pill we take 5 milligrams of to nudge ourselves into sleep. But biologically it’s much more than that.

This hormone is an essential part of the body’s core timing system, shaping circadian rhythms, regulating alertness and rest, and interacting with stress and immune pathways. When melatonin production is altered, the entire rhythm of the organism can shift. That matters a great deal when we’re talking about attention, focus, and responsiveness to the environment.

Seen through the lens of my Hunter in a Farmer’s world hypothesis, this study fits remarkably well. ADHD traits have long been framed as deficits because they clash with the demands of modern industrial society. Sit still. Focus narrowly for hours. Wake up at the same time every day regardless of season, light, or context.

These are Farmer traits. They are perfect for plowed fields, factory floors, classrooms, and offices. But they’re not the only way a nervous system can be organized.

In a Hunter or forager context, flexibility mattered more than rigidity. Being alert at odd hours could mean survival. Sensitivity to changes in light, sound, and movement was an advantage. The ability to hyperfocus when something meaningful appeared, followed by periods of rest or wandering attention, fit a world that was dynamic and unpredictable. A nervous system that didn’t lock itself into a single rhythm may have been exactly what was needed.

And lower or differently timed melatonin production could support that kind of life.

Rather than enforcing a strict sleep-wake cycle, it might allow for adaptive variability including night watchfulness, early morning vigilance, bursts of energy at nonstandard times, and a readiness to respond to sudden opportunity or threat all become more plausible in that context. None of that looks like pathology until you drop that nervous system into a world built around bells, clocks, deadlines, and indoor lighting.

What makes this study particularly interesting is that it pushes back against the idea that sleep problems in ADHD are merely secondary. For years the assumption has been that ADHD causes poor sleep because the mind will not shut off.

There is truth in that, but the genetic data suggest a shared root. The same biological systems that shape circadian timing may also influence attention regulation, impulse control, and cognitive endurance. That reframes ADHD not as a broken attention system but as a differently timed one.

The study also points toward inflammatory pathways, including interleukin 6, that intersect with melatonin biology. This matters because inflammation, stress response, and vigilance are tightly linked.

In ancestral environments, a nervous system tuned for alertness and rapid response would often be paired with a robust inflammatory and immune response. In the modern world, where chronic stress replaces acute danger, that same wiring can turn against us.

None of this means that melatonin supplements cure ADHD. Clinical trials have shown that while melatonin can help shift sleep timing and improve sleep quality, it does not reliably reduce core ADHD symptoms on its own.

That fact, though, actually strengthens the Hunter in a Farmer’s world model rather than weakening it. If ADHD were simply a sleep disorder, a hormone fix would solve it. Instead, what we see is a complex interaction between circadian biology, environment, expectations, and meaning.

The real problem, in my opinion, isn’t the nervous system at all; it’s the mismatch. We’ve built a civilization that demands uniform rhythms from bodies and minds that evolved to express diversity. We then label the people who don’t fit the dominant rhythm as “disordered.”

The melatonin findings suggest that some of that diversity is written into our genes, not learned behavior or moral failure.

This also helps explain why so many people with ADHD report doing their best thinking late at night, or feeling most alive when the world is quiet and distractions fall away. That is not laziness or defiance: it may, in fact, simply be our biology expressing itself honestly. It may be the Hunter waking up to the sound of prey nearby when the village sleeps.

The danger isn’t that these traits exist, but that our society keeps forcing them into a mold that denies their value. When we pathologize circadian differences, we miss the possibility that society itself is too rigid. We ask why the Hunter cannot become a Farmer, but we rarely ask whether the world still needs Hunters.

This study doesn’t prove my Hunter in a Farmer’s world hypothesis, but it does add another solid piece to the picture. ADHD isn’t just about attention: it’s also about timing, rhythm, and how a nervous system engages with the flow of the world. When we understand that, the conversation shifts.

Instead of asking how to fix people, we can begin asking how to build a world that makes room for all of us.

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When we talk about ADHD in our culture we almost always talk about what’s missing. We talk about the deficits. We talk about the chaos. We talk about the impulsivity that makes you late and the distractibility that leaves your desk a mess and the inability to sit still in a world built for people who can.

In a Farmer’s world that deficit frame makes sense: you rise at dawn, you follow the rows, you do the same tasks again and again and again. In that world, traits like routine and consistency are rewarded and the mind that wanders feels broken, like it can’t keep up with the plow.

But human beings weren’t always Farmers. For most of our evolutionary history we were Hunters, roaming across the savannah, moving in tribes or packs, scanning for patterns, reacting to opportunities and threats in real time. In that landscape, the traits we now label as “symptoms” of ADHD aren’t bugs. They’re the very qualities that made you a successful hunter.

A new study published in Psychological Medicine by researchers at the University of Bath, King’s College London, and Radboud University upends the deficit narrative and shows what many of us with ADHD have known intuitively all along: adults with ADHD frequently endorse psychological strengths like hyperfocus, humor, creativity, spontaneity, and intuitiveness more strongly than neurotypical peers, and knowing and using those strengths is linked with higher well-being, better quality of life, and fewer symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress.

This isn’t fluff. It’s the first large-scale, empirical lens on strengths in ADHD instead of deficits.

They asked 200 adults with ADHD and 200 without ADHD to rate themselves on 25 positive traits. And while people with ADHD often face real struggles in work, relationships, and mental health, they were just as likely to recognize their own strengths and apply them in everyday life.

That matters in the Hunter in a Farmer’s World model because it reframes the narrative. A Hunter mind isn’t flawed just because it doesn’t thrive in a sedentary, siloed, production-line world. Instead, the Hunter mind is optimized for scanning the horizon, seizing opportunities, and shifting focus quickly. It’s optimized for conditions of uncertainty, novelty, and change.

When you take those traits and try to squeeze them into a commodified, routine-oriented Farmer’s world, of course it feels like a deficit. Of course you get labeled restless or unfocused. You are essentially being penalized for not being built for that world.

But what the study makes clear is that within the ADHD mind there are strengths that can be harnessed.

Hyperfocus, for example, is a trait that looks like trouble when you can’t finish your taxes, but it looks like genius when you’re building something you care about. Hyperfocus is the ability to lock in deeply on something that grabs your attention, to go down the rabbit hole of complexity and emerge with insight. In a Hunter’s world that’s adaptive. In a Farmer’s world it’s misinterpreted as inability to switch off a task. A Farmer wants you to switch tasks at predictable intervals. A Hunter needs to zero in when target conditions are right. (SciTechDaily)

Creativity and spontaneity get the same treatment. In a routine-based context they’re messy. But in a world where rapid adaptation and novel solutions make the difference between resources and starvation, creativity and spontaneity are not just useful: they’re essential. And intuitiveness, the ability to read context and pattern faster than someone who is following a checklist, is a Hunter’s secret weapon.

The study also found that across both groups, whether you have ADHD or not, the more you know your strengths and use them, the better your life satisfaction and psychological health. That’s a profound point for how we think about human capability.

We’re all better when we know what we bring to the table, but for people with ADHD, who have long been told what they lack, the cultivation of strengths is not just an add-on. It’s a reorientation.

In the Hunter’s world, the mind isn’t measured by how well it sticks to one thing indefinitely but by how well it navigates complexity, how quickly it spots opportunities, and how flexibly it responds to change. That’s why Hunters are good at problem-solving in open-ended environments. That’s why many of the most creative thinkers, entrepreneurs, artists, explorers, and innovators recruit people with the very traits labeled as ADHD deficits.

They’re drawn to ambiguity and possibility. They find patterns where others see noise. They pivot without hesitation. These are competitive advantages in any domain that rewards exploration and invention.

But western society is still overwhelmingly Farmer-oriented. We build systems, institutions, and workplaces that reward consistency, predictability, and stability. So someone with a Hunter’s mind gets judged against Farmer criteria and inevitably falls short. We call it a “disorder” rather than a difference and then wonder why the person feels misunderstood.

This new research gives scientific backing to a different way of seeing it: that there are identifiable strengths in ADHD that can be cultivated, and that awareness of that strength correlates with well-being.

Imagine what happens when we take this insight deeper than today’s therapy models. What if schools, workplaces, and communities started to ask not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What are your strengths and how do they serve you?”

What if instead of punishing spontaneity we encouraged it in creative contexts?

What if instead of suppressing hyperfocus we taught people how to channel it into projects that matter?

The Hunter isn’t broken in the Farmer’s world: he or she’s misplaced.

The takeaway isn’t that ADHD is easy or that struggles disappear. It’s that there’s a whole suite of internal capabilities that have been overlooked because we’re judging brains built for dynamism by standards built for routine.

And when you recognize and use your own psychological strengths you don’t just cope better. You thrive.

For a mind built to hunt, a life that demands directionless compliance will always feel constricting. But when you understand what’s in your toolkit and start using it on your terms, you begin to rewrite the narrative.

This study doesn’t just challenge the deficit model of ADHD. It gives us a language to talk about ADHD the way Hunters would: a set of evolved capabilities that, when supported, can offer real psychological strength and resilience.

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It’s Christmas, and most of us are with family or friends, bringing to the forefront the challenges many of us Hunters have in such situations.

For most of history, we Hunters survived because we could read a situation faster and more accurately than anyone else. We noticed danger before others sensed a thing. We caught the subtle shift in the wind, the flick of movement in the grass, the tension in a rival’s face, the emotional weather inside a tribe.

In the modern world those same traits are still present in people with ADHD, but instead of being recognized as gifts, they often make us outliers.

For years, for example, after we’d have social interactions, my wife, Louise, would let me know all the times I’d barged in rhetorically, said something that upset somebody (that I didn’t realize), or just generally socially blundered.

She did it in a loving, teaching way so I’ve learned, over these past 53 years of marriage, how to be more functional in social situations. Now, when we’re about to get together with people, she’ll just gently say, “Don’t forget to listen more,” or “Pay attention to what other people are saying,” or “Think before you say something out loud.”

Many neurodivergent people spend their lives wondering why they seem to unsettle others without trying. The truth is that Hunters don’t unsettle people because we’re difficult; we often unsettle people because we see clearly.

Danielle Brycey recently posted to Instagram a raw and insightful reflection on what it feels like to move through a world built on layers of pretense. Most people, she said, sustain their day to day lives by relying on three invisible tools.

They socially mask, they avoid uncomfortable emotions, and they follow unspoken rules.

These behaviors keep society predictable and safe for those who depend on a shared sense of comfortable illusion. But neurodivergent people often don’t use those tools in the same way. We don’t mask as easily. We find it much harder to avoid the emotional currents running under conversations.

We hear what is not said. We see the mismatch between words, tone, and body language. And we notice patterns that others desperately try to pretend are not there.

This isn’t a flaw in neurodivergent people: it’s a flaw in a culture that prefers compliance over clarity. Danielle explained that most people communicate by subtext, saying one thing and meaning another.

A Hunter hears the literal words, sees the contradiction in the body, and immediately senses that something is off. That simple awareness can make others uncomfortable because those unspoken rules only work when nobody questions them. Hunters question them without effort. We can’t help seeing the gap between the story and the truth. In a world that runs on pretending, noticing the truth can feel like breaking a social law.

Many people also rely on subtle dominance games to structure their relationships: tone, silence, guilt, vague disapproval, and the little manipulations that nudges someone back into line. Neurotypical social order depends heavily on these cues.

But they don’t always work on Hunters. We’re not impressed by status, threatened by a tone of voice, and automatically fall into place when someone expects deference.

We don’t intuitively buy into the same hierarchies because, at a deep evolutionary level, Hunters were meant to be scouts and leaders, not followers in a rigid line. This resistance, which we often don’t even notice in ourselves (as Louise still reminds me), can feel threatening to people who depend on those hierarchies to maintain their own sense of control.

Once you begin seeing patterns in behavior, you can’t unsee them. Hunters track emotional patterns as easily as we track movement in the bushes.

When someone mistreats us or makes a false assertion, we don’t shrug and say it was probably nothing: we connect the dots. We remember the tone from last week. We recall the contradiction from yesterday. We recognize the pressure in the room. We see the pattern long before the other person wants it spoken aloud.

And because most people spend their lives avoiding their own behavior, they react not with curiosity or gratitude but with defensiveness. They shrink us so they don’t have to face themselves.

This is why so many neurodivergent people grow up feeling hard to manipulate. It isn’t because we’re stubborn or rebellious (although that’s sometimes the case): it’s because we had to analyze every microshift in other people’s behavior just to survive.

Hunters developed survival by observing the smallest cues, always scanning, always noticing. This evolutionary inheritance does not make us invincible, but it makes us unusually attuned to power and intention.

Those who try to control others through vagueness, guilt, triangulation, or subtle bullying can’t get around our internal radar. Their annoyance isn’t personal: it’s instinctive. When a tactic fails, people often decide that the person who resisted must be a problem. So labels appear. “Overreacting. Too sensitive. Difficult. Dramatic.” These labels function to ease others away from accountability.

Truth telling becomes its own offense. Hunters speak plainly because our minds are built that way. We don’t embellish or soften truth to protect someone’s ego: we simply say what is happening as we see it. Not the cruel truth, just the real truth.

But in a world built on avoiding discomfort, real truth is threatening. It breaks the illusion that allows people to pretend everything is fine when it is not.

What many neurodivergent people eventually discover is that they’re disliked not because they’re unkind or chaotic but because they’re clarifying. Their presence exposes what others spend years learning to ignore. Their insight makes the invisible visible. Their inability to play along breaks the social spell that keeps everyone comfortable but stagnant.

Society punishes the mirror holder because the mirror is often way too accurate.

So what do we do with that knowledge?

The first step is to stop pathologizing the very traits that kept our ancestors alive. The second is to recognize that discomforting others is not the same as harming them. Sometimes clarity is the only real gift available.

Hunters aren’t evolved to prop up artificial hierarchies or unspoken delusions. Our nervous systems are tuned for truth, motion, risk, creativity, pattern recognition, and deep perception. These aren’t deficits: they’re evolutionary tools.

The price of those tools is that we sometimes reflect back truths people don’t want to face. But the reward is that we also perceive possibility, connection, and meaning where others see only routine.

We disrupt not to break society but to make room for honesty and authenticity. And that, I’d argue, is exactly what this moment in history needs.