Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If people can't be arsed doing that and we give easy shortcuts for everything in life, what's the point in being alive? Embrace the shortcuts. Life's too short not to. What's that Plato quote about writing? If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but…
The truth is that we designed a system in which a majority of people cannot thrive and in which a lot of people end up developing problems like obesity or being labeled as ADHD. Now the same system designed a cure, one that you have to pay for and take for years if not for life, just so that you can rewire your perfectly normal brain to fit in the very imperfect mold of what the system needs Taking antidepressant won…
We designed — if you can call this "design" — a system where most people are not the literal property of their feudal lords and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Our genomes don't know we're not at constant risk of starving, they're not universally adapted to abundance. Heck, our genes are barely adapted to milk[0] or cooked food[1].
We don't know if our forebears had ADHD, but this not because they didn't, it's because approximately nobody in psychology wants to diagnose someone who isn't in the room with them — there's plenty of historical figures whose behaviour is compatible with such a diagnosis, which is a much weaker claim. Personally, I am suspicious of evolutionary psychology as being at risk of decorating "just-so" stories with just enough rigour to seem respectable, but even then one does need to make claims that at least add up, such as the ones behind this claim that it may have been an adaptation 50k years back: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-curiosities/20...
> The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
Life expectancy over the last 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-birth-...
Here's ADHD, albeit the chart only goes back 35 years not 50. Biggest increase is (+444% ~=) 5.4x in Qatar, not 100x. "Upper-middle-income countries" was 2%, USA was 30%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-with-adhd?tab=tabl...
> You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...
Mm. And despite all those errors, where we are is "living longer and healthier lives in greater comfort… unless you're American for some reason, you guys should look at what all the rest of us have been doing and copy us". Even a few of those examples, like asbestos, were direct improvements over the previous status quo of "perhaps my house/factory will burn down with me in it".
[0] lactose tolerance
[1] Our mouths are too small for all the teeth we have, soft food diet does this, cooking makes food softer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage