ADHD: The Hunter Economy Has Quietly Arrived - 5.9 million of them...

Volatility, AI, and the death of the corporate ladder are playing to Hunter strengths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 The pension has been replaced by a 401(k) you have to manage yourself.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And AI is the variable that makes this shift permanent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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