← Hacking Your ADHD
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- [00:01]
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- [00:23]
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- [01:21]
William Curb
Welcome to Hacking youg adhd. I'm your host William Curb, and I have adhd. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Hey team. I've been working on a presentation for an upcoming conference called Neurodiversion, and when I was thinking about what I wanted to present, the idea of memes came to me. And I'm going to be honest here, this was mostly out of a desire to just make looking at memes part of my regular work schedule. But as I started looking into the concept more and putting together the ideas for the presentation, I realized that there's more to it than I had initially thought. Memes are more than just digital clutter. They're a fairly vital part of modern culture. And I know how that sounds, but this is visual shorthand. They give us a way to communicate that we are part of an in group simply by understanding what the meme is. They are these inside jokes across entire online communities. And the more I dove in, the more I realized that memes are kind of important. More important than they seem, on the surface at least.
- [02:34]
William Curb (continued/narration)
They aren't just jokes.
- [02:35]
William Curb
They're a way to find community understanding and meaning. In our own experience, that's important, even if it comes from something silly. And so that's what we're going to be exploring in this episode today how memes can give us meaning, how they can give us community, and how they can also still be a little bit dangerous. If you'd like to follow along on the Show Notes page, you can find that@hackingyouradhd.com 278 alright, keep on listening to find out how to tell if you're looking at a helpful insight or just three ADHD symptoms in a trench coat. Let's start off by defining what a meme is. Because while we feel like we know what it is, it's also a little bit hard to describe. Is it just an image macro with some text, a funny gif, or are they all just in jokes? So the word meme was first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He used to describe how cultural ideas replicate and evolve, much like our genes. For Dawkins, a meme could be anything. A tune, a fashion trend, or even a belief. Basically any idea that spreads through imitation or mimicry. Now, when you or I are talking about a meme, we're almost certainly talking about some kind of Internet in my mind. Typically it's an image paired with text that makes it relatable, funny, and of course, shareable. But it could also be a webcomic or a screenshot of a social media post. We're not going to be gatekeeping here with a Back in my day, memes had to be cats asking for cheeseburgers. By the way, if you're looking to feel real old, Ican has cheeseburger first appeared 18 years ago. But anyways, back on topic, because of the rise of the social Internet, we really do get this viral Dawkinsque experience of what a meme is. It's not just a single image, it's a lineage. We have reoccurring archetypes like the distracted boyfriend or this is fine. We have formats and templates that evolve daily, sometimes hourly or faster, and inside jokes. Born in the trenches of Reddit and various niche fandoms across the web, they thrive on this remix culture where people hijack an existing meme to express entirely new ideas. And perhaps hijack isn't quite the right word here.
- [05:05]
William Curb (continued/narration)
Appropriation.
- [05:06]
William Curb
Taking the original and evolving it into something that is both new but also still familiar. And so memes become a form of social signaling, a way to say I get it and I belong. For us, that signaling is ADHD and neurodivergent. They play into these dopamine driven feedback loops where the micro burst of recognition and humor helps them go viral. When I see something funny that's ADHD related, there are people I'm going to send that to immediately. It's a way of saying, I see you through a screen. I think this is a perfect place to also introduce the concept of pebbling. So there's a phenomenon among Avalae and Gentoo penguins in which they present smooth pebbles, the kind used for nest building, to their partners as part of their courtship. A male penguin will present a female with a stone. If she's impressed, she'll find a stone too and they will go back and forth collecting until a nest is built. While this is a survival trait to keep their eggs dry, it's also an act that proves loyalty and interest. It's a small yet meaningful gesture that reinforces the connection and provides reinsurance in humans. Peddling works in a similar fashion with small, thoughtful or humorous gifts as a way of showing affection and maintaining social bonds. It's an act of saying I'm thinking of you without the executive function required to write that long text. And of course, this can apply to the act of sharing memes as well. Now this has become quite a popular idea in the neurodivergent community as a form of nonverbal communication, especially for those who find traditional social maintenance drain it. Pebbling provides a way to express affection in a low stakes way. Memes are one of the easiest pebbles we can give, but they are still telling someone hey, thinking of you. Of course the context has to be there. If I send my friend a dungeon crawler Carl meme and they've never read it, they're just gonna send me back a question mark and still have no idea who Mongo is and why he is appalled. But if I send them a meme about how we both need to hydrate because I just remembered that I haven't
- [07:27]
William Curb (continued/narration)
had anything to drink in a few
- [07:29]
William Curb
hours and I know my bestie is probably in the same shape. Well then, that works out. This isn't just about one on one interactions though. There are plenty of places online where you can signal that you are part of the in group with a well placed me.
- [07:48]
William Curb (continued/narration)
It's a digital secret handshake. Admittedly, the other side can also happen when we see a how do you do fellow kids moment from a brand. It's clear they don't know what they're talking about and it signals that they are an outsider pretending to be an insider. This is why corporate memes often feel so as the young people Say cringe. Now for the ADHD brain, a meme can do something remarkable. It can distill a complex experience like time blindness, rejection, sensitivity or executive dysfunction into a single, instantly relatable image. We see it and think, this is exactly what I feel without having to explain the messery wiring of our brain in between. Take Danny Donovan's classic ADHD storytelling comic. It perfectly captures the nature of the twists and turns that come up. While we're trying to tell a simple story, we're adding context and relating other pieces and remembering Khushu details out of order. And so in a single image, it relates an entire experience that so many of us with ADHD have experienced.
- [09:00]
William Curb
When we have this cultural shorthand, we get both humor and support. They normalize the condition and help fight the internalized shame we often feel around our adhd. It turns, I'm failing again into my brain is just doing that storytelling thing again, which is far more compassionate. Additionally, memes are novel. They're fast, visual and bite sized. Exactly what the ADHD brain craves. It's why meme scrolling is so addictive. Each one can offer a micro burst of dopamine, but paradoxically, that scroll can be both a trap and a sanctuary. We find humor that helps us process emotions and normalizes our feelings. They can even help us process the frustration of being misunderstood. We have memes about neurotypicals asking why we can't just use a planner. They turn that frustration into social commentary and community insight. But as I said, this can also be a trap. So I don't want to leave this by saying that memes are amazing and we should love them all of the time. One of the unfortunate side effects of how well memes propagate is that they do so with any idea that's sticky enough, meaning they easily become vectors for misinformation. Because memes lack context, they can be very dangerous. One example comes from the issue of over pathologizing adhd, where a brief look through some memes makes us feel like every quirk of ours is actually a symptom. This can lead to a loss of agency, making us wonder, am I a person or am I just a collection of ADHD traits? By pathologizing mundane things, we can sometimes take something that is a universal human experience and label it as just another piece of adhd. Walking into a room and forgetting why you're there. Everyone experiences that. Losing your keys also universal. The difference with ADHD often comes from the severity and the chronic nature of the disorder. Still, we have to be careful to avoid the everyone is a little ADHD narrative. It devalues the actual impairment of the disorder and makes it harder for people with severe executive dysfunction to be taken seriously. I mean, one of my favorite misinformation memes is from a screengrab of a post with the text Getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult owns because you get to walk into a doctor's office and have a guy with a medical degree tell you hey boss, you got diet autism and the cure is to microdose meth. LMFAO funny. Sure, that's why it spreads, but it is categorically wrong. ADHD is not diadautism and stimulant medication is molecularly and functionally very different from meth. When someone shares this, even as a joke, it can easily reinforce the stigma that prevents people from seeking help. At the same time, I don't want to be the fun police here. As I said, I kind of find this meme funny, but I also want to acknowledge the danger that can come with the virality without context. I know that post was a joke, but not everyone who sees it will. Some may even have their current views of ADHD reinforced and see it as further proof that it's just a made up disorder. We know that just because someone is reposting something doesn't make it true, but it's still a trap we can easily fall into. I can't count the number of times I've read something to my wife, only to realize halfway through that I hadn't actually checked a single source on it. It is incredibly easy to fall for something just because it looks true enough. So as we move through these digital spaces, we need to does this meme normalize a struggle, or does it romanticize a disability? Does it describe a trait like being messy or a symptom like executive dysfunction? A meme tries to be a map, but it doesn't always show the way. It might be a way to help you find your community, but it shouldn't be mistaken for the clinical reality of your brain. A good meme makes you feel seen. A bad meme makes you feel like a caricature. If a meme makes a symptom feel quirky but ignores the impairment, be skeptical. Memes are an incredible tool for connection, but they were never meant to be a tool for clinical self assessment. Use them to find your tribe, to pebble your friends, and to laugh at the chaos. Thanks for sticking with us all the way to the end. Before you go though, let's do a quick Rundown of Today's top tips 1. For ADHD brains, traditional social upkeep sometimes requires more executive function than we have available. Pebbling allows for low stakes connections that signal thinking of you without the cognitive load of a conversation.
- [13:59]
William Curb (continued/narration)
2.
- [14:00]
William Curb
Digital content can act as a starting point for self discovery, but it's still not a diagnostic tool. A meme can point you in the right direction, but it doesn't represent the actual lived experience of your impairment. Don't mistake a relatable quirk for the totality of the disorder. 3. Virality is not a proxy for truth. ADHD brains can be prone to sticky ideas and sometimes skip steps on very verifying facts. The shift here is moving from it's relatable, so it's true to it's relatable, but what's the source? Alright, that's it. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. Feel free to connect with me over hackingyouradhd.com contact if you'd like links or to read this episode's transcript, you can go to the show notes page@hackingyouradhd.com 278 and if you'd like even more hacking graded HD, be sure to sign up for my newsletter any and all distractions which comes out every other week. In it, I give out my best distractions of the week, either what I'm reading, what I'm watching, what I'm playing, and everything in between. I also try to give out a few bits of actionable advice in each newsletter, although your mileage is certainly going to vary there. If that sounds like something you're interested in, head on over to hackingyouradhd.com newsletter. Also, be sure to check out the Hacking youg adhd patreon@hackingradyhd.com Patreon. It's a pay what you want model, meaning that all levels of the Patreon will receive all the same stuff. You can pay $0 or $2 or $10 and it's all the same. And while you're there, be sure to check out our Discord or get access by heading on over to hackingyouradhd.com Discord also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which you can find@YouTube.com hackingyouradhd and finally, if you'd like another way to support the show, the best way to do so is to tell someone about the show, especially if you think a particular episode would resonate with them. Just click the share button on your podcast player and now for your moment of Dad, I bought a fake koi fish for my pond. I like it, but it's just a decoy.
- [16:21]
Ryan Reynolds
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