Hey I’m someone who can answer this.

ADHD, by itself, does not have manic episodes. There’s a lot of supporting documentation to that effect.

Mania is often caused by having too much dopamine. ADHDers don’t have enough dopamine ever, unless with medication, or with hyperfocus.

So the similarity you’re seeing is only in that people with ADHD will negotiate, move things around, eat only ramen for a month in order to buy things related to the new hyperfocus. Pursuing the hyperfocus gives us dopamine, so we will do lots to justify getting that, since we don’t have any. People with bipolar can have manic episodes which can be caused by an abundance of dopamine, which leads them to doing things they shouldn’t, because they can’t control themselves.

I can’t speak for others, but all of the blockhead decisions I’ve ever made while hyperfocusing and buying too many supplies, I’ve absolutely known I shouldn’t, and why I shouldn’t, but I’m trying to get my fix so I’m going to buy that lockpicking kit, thankyouverymuch, and if I have to eat ramen for a week to do it, I will!

(Pro tip I got from someone else online. If the hyperfocus gets you bad, spend lots and lots of extra time shopping for, researching, and making damn sure the thing you want to buy is the perfect one for your hyperfocus. I’ve been able to buy myself a couple of weeks this way, which allowed me to save up. I treat hyperfocus like unexpected car maintenance problems nowadays.)

There are many parallels between various mental illnesses.

Nah this is pretty average for ADHD too. Maybe not sinking a fuckload of money (I guess it depends on the person) but hyperfixations are a thing. Get really focused on one thing because it gives you dopamine so you sink more and more time into it until no more dopamine. Suddenly it becomes a chore to do like everything else, you feel betrayed, and end up in a feeling of malaise trying to find your next hit of dopamine.

I’ve never pursued any formal diagnosis and just have the observations of my own mind to go on, but I have a lot of common ADHD symptoms and I do sometimes have the kinds of manic phases you’re describing but not to a debilitating severity. It’s just this state of high energy, usually for me involves creative output, and yeah other previously important goals wind up feeling secondary.

Happy to sacrifice sleep, etc., but I don’t usually make damaging decisions, I’m able to keep my broader priorities in mind at least. Better today than I used to be at that but it never really caused me big problems.

But it feels a lot like a mild version of the comic - my last one was a big, kind of involved Halloween build. Wooden construction that included lights, a fog machine, and a 3’x3’ sheet of plexiglass with a big printed decal. I’ve never designed/built a Halloween decoration in my life, or much that’s very similar. Other times it’s a software project, or something musical. Kinda thing that pulls me outta bed in the middle of the night for no real reason, just (almost annoyingly) stoked. Until it passes.

No idea what that says about ADHD and the broader “symptom creep” you’re describing (imo, accurately).

I ain’t trying to make it. I don’t want to do programming. This is more of a nightmare than I expected. I hate every second of it. I’m doing it to try and pay my electricity bill.

You can if you want, Daddy

Either that or it becomes my new personality for weeks because I managed to figure it out along the way. Then, after spending too much time and money on it, it’s completely abandoned.

Wasting your time? impossible. All you’re learning will at least gently affect everything else you do. Will you contribute meaningfully to foss? only time will tell.

Like any craft, you git good by doing. The first program I wrote was in ASIC to fix 2500 computers on a LAN. We were a small shop (7 ppl) providing on-site support for a large complex. We were gearing up to have to go to 2500 desks and edit win.ini to make sure Vshare was set up for ccMail.

I stayed late a couple nights and wrote a little app to copy win.ini line by line to a new file and fix vshare in the process. Then, it ran some sanity checks to make sure the file looked good, and the files were swapped out. Saved us a LOT of time.

A few jobs later, we had a Cold Fusion/IIS server that would occasionally corrupt logs and we needed reports on the logs for our clients. I couldn’t nail down what caused the error. The files were multiple gigabytes in the day where an entire company could comfortably work off of 2GB. I found the problem, they were missing a linebreak once in a while, and the analytics app we were using would just shit the bed on that.

I needed to break up the offending lines or at least remove them. I didn’t have enough time or space to copy them to a new file.

This was pre-2000 so the languages and tooling were pretty dumb.

I learned some PHP, but memory was an issue, abandoned I learned some Perl that worked, but it took many hours, and I’d have to dedicate a box to just fixing the logs every morning. I finally bit the bullet and learned enough C to fix it; it only took an hour to run.

Since then, I’ve just been learning to solve problem after problem and have chosen tools that I didn’t know. Keep on amateuring. Do small projects and cron jobs with different languages/tools.

Branch out into new languages when you have to start finding hacks to do things in current languages. Once you get good at working on smaller pictures, the big pictures won’t look as daunting.

I have zero programming experience and zero computer know how at all. I am, however, out of a job and in desperate need for cash for the simple basics. So I dunno how long this is going to take but not being able to see the big picture and not knowing if I’m wasting my time… oh my christ do I relate to that. Even the request had me staring at it like “Oh god.” I did warn them that there was no guarantee it would ever materialize due to my own failings and if it did it would be a hot damn minute.

I have so many saved tabs right now about rust and apis and docker and sql stuff. For someone whose total computer knowledge is “Settings where the things go” and “don’t delete system32” this is… terrifying.