If the Modern World Overwhelms You, is it Because You’re a Hunter Living in a Farmer’s World?

And once you understand that, you can start living in a way that honors your wiring instead of fighting it…

Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

The strange thing about living with ADHD in 2025 is that the world insists on calling it “anxiety.” Therapists call it anxiety. Teachers call it anxiety. Even doctors often reach for that label before they ask a single question about wiring, temperament, childhood, or the basic structure of your day.

But the truth is far more interesting, and far more hopeful: most of what ADHD adults describe as anxiety isn’t anxiety at all. It’s misdirected readiness. It’s an ancient survival system looking for something real to do.

The Hunter brain evolved to scan the horizon, constantly shifting attention between motion, sound, pattern, and intuition. It’s a system built for vigilance, for reading the landscape, for noticing the thing nobody else sees.

For hundreds of thousands of years that vigilance saved lives. It kept the tribe fed, safe, mobile, and aware of danger long before danger reached camp. It meant being tuned into the slightest shift in wind, light, or animal behavior. It meant being the person who woke up at the crack of a twig or the rustle in the grass.

That constant readiness wasn’t anxiety. It was competence.

Now drop that same brain into 2025.

Instead of rustling grass, it gets Slack notifications. Instead of animal tracks, it gets credit card alerts. Instead of a burst of adrenaline that results in action, it gets an email with the subject line “gentle reminder.” Instead of a crisis it can run toward, it gets a calendar ping for a meeting that shouldn’t exist.

The Hunter brain tries to respond to every one of these signals as if they’re meaningful, because in the world that created it, every signal was meaningful. In a forest or a savanna you don’t ignore subtle cues or you could pay with your life. In a modern Farmer’s office you’re supposed to just let them go by.

That mismatch is where the suffering, the “anxiety,” comes from.

It’s not that ADHD adults are more anxious than everybody else. It’s that the modern world produces a constant trickle of micro-threats, tiny little pings that never release, never resolve, never lead to decisive action.

The Hunter brain is firing up the survival system all day long with no way to discharge it. You can’t sprint across the savanna to deal with a calendar reminder. You can’t stalk a problem you’re told not to start working on until the meeting starts. You can’t get resolution from a Slack thread.

So the energy builds. And builds. And builds until it feels like a pending explosion.

People with ADHD often describe a feeling of restlessness, of not being able to relax even when nothing’s wrong. That’s not anxiety. That’s a Hunter’s nervous system trapped in a Farmer’s daily schedule.

Farmers could wait. They could pace life around seasons and cycles. The most predictable thing about a farm is the repetition: same fields, same paths, same routines, day after day.

A Farmer’s brain evolved to thrive on stability and consistency, but a Hunter’s brain evolved to thrive on movement, novelty, surprise, and rapid shifts in focus. One wiring system isn’t better than the other, but put a Hunter in a Farmer’s world and the Farmer’s world will insist he’s broken.

This is why, paradoxically, so many ADHD adults feel calm during real emergencies.

When a car spins out on the highway, when a child gets injured, when something actually requires quick attention and fast assessment, the Hunter brain turns on and everything suddenly feels natural.

There’s no anxiety in those moments. There’s clarity. There’s purpose. There’s competence. That’s the original environment: the moment where sensitivity becomes strength. The Farmer brain may freeze, but the Hunter brain wakes up.

Compare that to a society full of abstract obligations.

Our modern world is built on invisible tasks. Invisible jobs. Invisible pressures. You’re supposed to remember a thousand tiny deadlines, most of which have no sensory reality at all. They exist as words on a screen, as expectations from a boss, as a recurring alarm that means nothing except that somebody wants your attention.

For a Hunter brain, that’s maddening. It’s the neurological equivalent of hearing a twig snap every five minutes but never being allowed to look toward the sound. The body interprets the signal as danger, but the mind is told it’s just Tuesday.

That chronic disconnect is what gets labeled “anxiety.” And then people wonder why medication alone doesn’t fix it. Or why mindfulness apps don’t cure it. Or why telling someone with ADHD to “just calm down” is like telling a smoke alarm to stop being so sensitive when the wiring is literally meant to detect risk before anyone else does.

ADHD adults aren’t anxious people. We’re people living in an environment that keeps tripping a nervous system built for a completely different century.

The way forward is through understanding, not pathologizing. If you have ADHD, you aren’t weak or fragile or neurotically anxious. You’re tuned differently.

You’re hypersensitive to shifting conditions because your ancestors survived by being that way. You experience the world as a field of constant motion because your brain evolved to track constant motion. You brace for things that never arrive because your wiring expects meaningful cues, not phantom obligations.

And the shame that so many ADHD adults carry isn’t the result of their wiring. It’s the result of a society that punishes difference and celebrates conformity above all else.

But once you understand the mismatch, you can start to reclaim your strengths. You can build your life around the way your brain naturally operates.

You can use movement, novelty, challenge, and creativity as tools instead of trying to crush yourself into a mold built for someone else. You can stop mistaking readiness for fear.

And you can begin to see your wiring not as a flaw, but as a different form of intelligence, one that the world desperately needs, even if it doesn’t always realize or understand it.

If the modern world overwhelms you, it’s likely not because you’re anxious. It’s because you’re a Hunter living in a Farmer’s world, like the title of my first book on ADHD.

And once you understand that, you can start living in a way that honors your wiring instead of fighting it.